A Developing Idea for Body of Work

Just as I come to an initial end point in the Glasgow project and direct my thoughts towards submitting this as part of my 3rd assignment, I am already starting to think about moving on from this and developing something slightly different for the final body of work submission.

My idea is a similar concept I developed as part of assignment 5 for PWDP whereby I juxtaposed pairs of photographs to highlight their differences. My ideas is thus to pair together photographs from my Lost project with those from the latest Glasgow project to reflect on my changing relationship with both places and with Land.

I am also thinking of using three different types of pairings:

The first type will be similarly composed to suggest ‘the same but different’, and thus remark on their contrasting similarities. The following are an example of this approach:

The second type will use the blackening out technique I have used in an earlier project to highlight the barriers put in place by society to restrict engagement with Land, and then juxtaposing this with a visual comment on the implications of this – good or bad.  The following are an example of this approach:

The third type will simply become a conversation created by the fact that two seemingly quite different images are juxtaposed with each other yet don’t seem to follow the previous two approaches. Examples of this idea are as follows:

This is something that I want to play with a little more; probably between Assignment 3 & 4, to see how each of these approaches work together in an overall set. I am also already thinking that it will be important for a sense of each place to be retained within each half of the paring and that together they also respond to my underlying concept of investigating my personal & changing relationship with Land.

And thereby goes the next challenge!

Reflection and Chance Encounters

The course notes ask that you should regularly reflect on your current direction of travel with your project and whether there is a need or desire to change this direction. This is the main focus of this post.  I am currently at a stage where I need to pull together what I have done so far and make important decisions on what the final output to this course will be, therefore, it is an important stage for me to reflect on what I have done so far and what I should go on to do next.

I like to think that I have been open to change as I have continued to develop my thoughts around this Body of Work and, when I look back at my initial ideas, I do see evidence of the change between these early thoughts and what I am doing just now. However, what hasn’t changed is my central concept of investigating what I call ‘Land Values’.  In fact, if anything, this concept has grown stronger in clarifying what it is that I am trying to achieve and stopped me from drifting off on tangents that mean nothing to my initial intentions.  Whilst this might sound contrary to what I have claimed at the beginning; that I am open to change, I remain confidently assured that this is the right path for me to take and it is the approach and interpretation to this which I want to continue to reflect on.

One significant change in my personal circumstances that I have tried to embrace in my project is that of moving home from the north of England to Scotland. This is what I would call a chance encounter as I had no idea that this would happen when I started this module and has become something that has helped me to form my developing ideas around this body of work.  I have thus spent the last few months wandering around this new area with my camera taking photographs of what caught my attention.  It has helped me to get a better sense of this place and come to build up a relationship with it.

My impending third assignment has thus been intended as a study of the place I now live (Glasgow’s West End) to understand the opportunities this presents (or does not) for me to engage with this place and with the Land. I am, however, already thinking about how this might change when I begin to pull this together into some sort of final body of work – how will I link this project with some of my other projects, which are rested but not ignored?

To conclude, I think that I have engaged in a healthy dose of self-challenge on my approach to the central concept of Land Values, which has seen changes I could not have initially intended, however, I have also been quite firm in my belief that the central concept which sits behind this is what I want to continue to investigate. So much so that I do see this extending beyond this module and photography course and into my longer term normal practice.

Glasgow’s West End project

I feel that I have now come to an appropriate resting point in my wanderings around the West End of Glasgow and thus want to reflect on what this project is beginning to say.

To start with, I have to say that it is a possibility that I may not actually use many of the photographs taken so far in this project as part of my main body of work, but this does not diminish the value of doing it as it has enabled me to better understand the place I now live and the opportunities it presents to further develop my identity based on these new surroundings.

Aesthetically, I have taken a ‘straight’ approach to the style of photographs, which are representative of a topographical assessment of the place whereby the portrayal of information is of greater importance than the enticement of beauty. If I was being critical of them, they do not provide clear separation of a main object or feature in a way that I have noticed in other photographer’s styles using a similarly straight approach.  My response to this is that such space is a scare commodity in this urban environment thus my photographs do represent this condensed way of living.

A small note on my decision to crop to 4×3 landscape orientation is that I have done this because this is personal preference and I have also had it in the back of my mind that I might want to pair two images together therefore a cropped 4×3 is better for this than 6×4.

I also think that I need to address the reason for no (or very few) people in this set. The ultimate reason for this is that my Body of Work is about Land and not immediately about place, even though the message behind this set is more about a lack of Land and a lack of opportunity to engage with it.  I recently went to the Chris Killip exhibition at Tate Britain which was based around a collection of photographs of people engaging with place in the North East of England.  This was clearly about the relationship between society and place, which helped me to be clear in my own mind that I wanted this project  to be about the relationship between place, Land and the personal identity this creates for me.  Society is something that I am only slowly getting to know here!

The following set are thus formed from a wider collection of photographs of the West End of Glasgow, whereby I have tried to tell the story of this place I now live and how it might continue to present opportunities for me to engage with it. None of these images are particularly significant to me, other than one perhaps, unlike the photographs in Lost where each one has a particular story to tell.  I wonder whether this is indicative of the different ways in which we engage with Land and place between childhood and adulthood, or are there other factors in play influencing this relationship?  The photographs are merely what caught my eye as I wandered around this place.  They represent opportunities rather than stories – opportunities to influence my future, and, specifically relevant to this investigation,  opportunities to engage or disengage with Land.

One further thought is that even though I tagged this project with a quick title of New I now think that as I have written this and selected the following photographs I am beginning to realise that a better title would be Opportunities.

  

   

  

  

  

  

Literature Review

Land Values and Phtography

This blog is an overview of my Literature Review for Contextual Studies, but only within the context of its relevance to my Body of Work:

The following therefore describes some of my thoughts, concerns and challenges I have gone through in developing a literature review around the general subject of Land Values and Photography:

• It was difficult to pitch the literature review in the right context as, at this stage, I was still unclear on the final direction for my Body of Work.
• However, I wasn’t intentionally trying to contextualize my body of work at this stage.
• The literature review delved into the philosophical distinctions to the term value and society’s potential need to take action.  This included a short literature survey of the different strategies undertaken by photographers to express their view on society’s relationship with and value for Land. 
• My concern was that I was concentrating too much on the philosophy of ‘value’ and less so on visual culture. This was also probably coming through on my project development at the same time.
• I thus concluded, mainly following my feedback on the literature review that I needed to a particular aspect of visual culture as it related to land values – this helped me to refocus my body of work too.