Im Jake Hoffman, a Dublin based, Irish visual artist, who studied photography at the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art Design and Technology. My practice, methodology, and style of image-making are derived from a social documentary standpoint. Illustrated through the monochromatic relational dynamics of environmental setting and experimental means; lie narratives often centred on lifestyles, subcultures, and their harmonious structures, with the photographic reflecting the trajectory of cultural and communal habits and their inhabitants.With an adoration for subcultures often characterised as reckless, vandalistic, and criminal, my subjective perception of the everyday was critically shaped through the communal lifestyles of graffiti and skateboarding in Dublin city. My attention was drawn toward the photographic medium as means to document the hidden corners of a contemporary albeit questionable lifestyle, its habits and inhabitants. Later, interest would come in the form of more experimental and conceptual means of the medium in monochromatic multiple exposures, to the avail of complete unpredictability and composed of elements of Dublin and contrasted with silhouettes of my affiliates, the finished product sparked an infatuation. Following an exposure to the practice, legacy and oeuvre of the L.A based, Irish photographer Brian ‘B+’ Cross’s RHA exhibition ‘Ghost Notes: Music of The Unplayed’, I swiftly assembled a portfolio and applied to study photography at the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art Design and Technology. It was here, my photographic practice simultaneously evolved and reverted from a conceptual/experimental process into documentary.
