I was fortunate enough the other week to have another opportunity to present and discuss my Body of Work at the Scotland Study Group day. Its a shame that these events don’t attract a larger group as, for those who do attend, we all seem to get a great amount from it in terms of the development of our thoughts and work. I don’t think that we should underestimate the benefit we can all get from reviewing our work with a professional photographer and tutor Wendy McMurdo.
With this review I wanted to present some of my further thoughts since the Barnsley residential. I had decided since that critique that I needed to go through a final deconstruction process of my work to get to a stage that I might be happy to draw the line on and suggest its completion. The main driver to this is that I have continued to have a sense that it needed something more but was unsure of what or how. I have also picked this up as the general theme of advice from others. In the review I presented different ideas for the title of the work, ways in which I might tighten up the collective colour and tone of images within each set as a way of making clearer which set they belong to, a tightening of the compositional alignment of some of the pairings of images so that this aspect can be seen a little more clearly, and also alternative pairings of images. All of which is difficult to explain here without going into more detail with examples but I expect to do this in other posts as I progress with the work.
The interesting feature from what I presented is that it triggered thoughts from those I presented to which I hadn’t expected and we then went through a thorough discussion on some of the things I might think about for developing the work further. The general conclusion I came away with is that I would need to go through quite a bit of extra work if I wanted to wanted to take this project to the next level in its development. I was challenged about my reluctance to do this, with the question posed of “what do I have to lose? My obvious answer to this was that I might make a mess of what I already have and in a practical sense I only have one further assignment review to go and thus little further opportunity to change and amend afterwards.
I have decided that it is worth doing this to see where this takes me and then I can review against the project as it is now. I can then decide how to present for final assessment. The implications of this is that my next and final assignment for Body of Work is likely to be delayed somewhat, particularly if it means going back to Thornhill to take more photographs
Major Project 