Grayson Perry: Who Are You

Grayson Perry: Who Are You is a three-part Channel 4 documentary which is distributed by All3Media International.

Who it was made by:

•   Music: Avshalom Caspi
•   Camera: Louis Caulfield, Marcus Plowright
•  Sound: Adam Scourfield
• Production Co-ordinator: David Brooke
• Production Manager: Caroline Turner
• Researcher: Molly Schneider
• Assistant Producer: Marvyn Benoit
• Producer: Juliet Riddell
• Editor: Jake Martin
• Executive Producer: Dinah Lord
• Series Producer: Joe Evans
• Director: Neil Crombie

The documentary that we watched in class is about an artist named Grayson Perry who gets to know four individuals who all struggle or have struggled with their identity. These individuals are Chris Huhne, Rylan Clark, Kayleigh and Jazz.  He discovers more about their personal lives and how they are more to what they appear to be on the outside because it is necessary that he understood who the subjects think they are. From this information, Perry creates a portrait of each of these people which reflects their stories and identity and at the end of the episode, they are able to see these portraits which have been put up in the National Portrait Gallery.

Personally, I really enjoyed this documentary because I like the way it shows the journey of the individuals and how they have changed and developed throughout their life based on the important decisions they have made. I additionally like how Grayson Perry has taken these substantial factors and then embedded them within the portraits because it makes them extremely personal and also reflective on the people’s past and who they are now as an individual. Each portrait is completely different from the next because they are all made from dissimilar mediums and are of contrasting sizes which mirrors the people’s distinctive personalities; this in turn gives the portraits a very high significance because it shows how everyone has a unique identity and a different story.

I believe that this documentary is very clever because it focuses on those who are struggling with defining their identity and who they are or who they were as a person and then towards the end, they have the opportunity to see themselves through the eyes of Grayson Perry. This helps them to understand how they are seen by other people and they themselves can begin to acknowledge who they really are as a person, they are discovering their identity.