Box meanings

My second task in the course was to take a cardboard box and place it around Balham and take pictures of it. As strange as it sounds, it was actually a lot of fun doing that because I was able to know the idea of 'thinking outside the box' a lot more. I was asked to place the box down thinking about the meaning the box will have depending on what location I place it in. E.g. When I placed it down next to some garbage, you will think that the box itself is garbage too, but if I were to place it in a shop, you'd think that there are items in the box waiting to be delivered. This whole idea got me interested to try out doing this task in different ways.

Putting a box in the middle of the road and photographing it might sound crazy, but it's not the craziest thing I've done in my life so it wasn't too embarrassing. The idea behind this was to give a sense of depression. When you see a box on the middle of the road, you will think that it's going to get run over by a car. Just placing it on the road gives the viewer an idea of danger or even suicide.

Another thing it can suggest is isolation. The box is stationary and can't move whilst all the vehicles around it can. This can suggest that there is someone who's too afraid to move as if he was stuck in the middle of the road with moving cars surrounding him without giving him an escape route. This leads to some very deep thinking although it's just a box on the road. A box can suggest something completely different which doesn't without looking at the box itself. It can give meaning to something else whilst just being an object at a certain area.

This image shows my box next to a newspaper stand. This tells you that there are magazines inside of the box, but the box can also be empty. I took this image at 1pm which gives an opening to a new factor which is time. Every morning, there are people giving out newspapers which are located in boxes. At 1pm, those people no longer give out those newspapers so an image of the box taken at that time can suggest that it is empty, but if it was taken at 8am, you could argue that there is something inside of that box.