Home

A simple post of another developing idea.

Psychogeography & Art or Just Play?

Or, My Nine Year Old Could Do Better Than This!

This last week I had my nine year old niece visiting and, as only photography students might understand, I decided to take advantage of a game that we played and turned it into part of my studies – a game of psychogeography!

The rules of the game were based on a treasure trail downloaded from the internet taking us around the West End of Glasgow – the area I have recently moved to and now live.  The pschogeography code that I set upon was to follow the treasure trail instructions to find each clue and then to take a photograph of anything that caught my eye, and anything that caught my niece’s eye.  My niece was to take the first photo in each location so that she wasn’t influenced by me.

The results are quite interesting.  One photographer was trying to take straight, informative photos that purposely avoided some of the more appealing aesthetic strategies, whilst the other photographer had limited understanding of what these aesthetic strategies might be.  In the comparisons below can you detect which is which?  Another question to ponder is whether the results of this are art of play?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Assignment 2 – Response to Tutor feedback

I wanted to create some space between receiving my feedback for Assignment 2 and writing this response, which is why I am only just writing it now.  I found that had become attached to my very specific ideas on Lost, and in this assignment submission I had developed it into a substantive project whereby the next steps would probably have been ones of refinement and editing.  I see this now as a crucial decision point between continuing on this very specific journey or taking time out to allow other developments to influence my decisions about the Body of Work.  I therefore needed this time and space to break my mind set and come to believe in the advice I was being given.

To set the right tone to what I have tried to describe above, this wasn’t a feeling of rejection on what I had done so far, but much more one of reflection. The general feedback was positive and encouraging in how I had “effectively moved the ideas along very thoroughly” but a core piece of advice was to “put everything else on the backburner for now and go with that momentum [the development of my idea for a new project around the area I now live]”  I can see how this might become a further piece of the developing jigsaw without being too transfixed at the moment as to how this will all come together in the final gathering.

The other key message (or word) I took from this feedback was “ambiguity” & the opportunity that this gives to the viewer.  This is something I have regularly tried to challenge myself about – having the confidence to be ambiguous, and I am also aware that my proposals for the book to support some of the images in Lost would remove that ambiguity and become a very direct, personal interpretation.  I will need to think some more about whether to move on from this book idea, but for now it is resting on the backburner.

My next steps are thus to become a flaneur around the area I have recently moved in to.  As I said in my assignment submission, I can see the potential for how this could come together in connection with what I have already done so far.  This next assignment submission is, therefore, likely to concentrate on the development of this new idea.