Final Catch-up

Well, it’s been quite some time since my last post which was around the time of my final assignment submission back in December.  After the effort of finishing Body of Work just within the two year deadline; whilst also having quite a stressful time over that two year period of moving house twice, getting used to a new Country (Scotland), and putting all my efforts into a rather busy new job, I felt burnt out having achieved this academic milestone.  I thus decided to have a break before deciding on  my next steps, which has admittedly lasted much longer than I initially intended, but is still something that I needed.

In this time I have also been giving quite some thought into whether I wanted to continue or had I come to the end of the journey with these studies.  I have never intended to become a practicing artist and thus my focus has been on the academic challenge that this course has provided, whereas the final module seems much more attuned to the former. This is something I am still battling and struggle with its value to me, however, for now I have decided to get up to date with this blog, tidy it up, and get ready for assessment (I have just missed the last one so have to wait until later this year, or enter all modules together once they are all finished).

So the next few blogs will be a catch-up to make sure all the assignments and assessment submission documents are available, and any other relevant posts in-between.

Photo book format idea

I wanted to share this link which is a Youtube video of a book layout I am really interested in.

It is very similar in concept to how I have been think about creating the book for my work.  If you can’t see the video, the concept is that the book folds out into three sections with the middle page being created from the overlap of pages either from the right or the left.  It is a very clever concept which seems to create an interesting experience for the viewer.

My idea was for the book to fold out into four pages and thus become, in effect, two books joined together and which should be enjoyed together.  I hadn’t even thought of only having three pages open and overlapping the pages in the book – not sure if I will use that specific technique but what I did notice was how the binding of the book allowed the pages to open flat which is exactly how I want my book to work so that there is then no issue over curved pages folding back over themselves etc.

This is just a placeholder for an idea at the moment but is something that I will keep in the back of my mind.

p.s. I picked up the link to this video from Beyond Words who are selling the book on their website:  http://www.beyondwords.co.uk/p/2387/moises

 

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.

Back to the issue of Land Values

I have been giving a lot of thought recently to the continuing direction of my Body of Work and how it links to Contextual Studies and my major written paper.  The problem I have been having in my mind is that the concept behind Land Values is quite philosophical and I have been think that my Body of Work was at risk of drifting away from this concept (at least in my mind) – it had the potential of becoming more about place, memory and aspirations, rather than my relationship with Land itself.  I was also struggling to find a focus for my written paper that covered this philosophical subject whilst still relating it to photography.

I posed a question about this on the Flickr forum but in the end concluded that I needed to work this out for myself.  The good news is that this reflection has really helped me to focus on what I want to say.

In this reflection, I have attempted to respond to the following questions: what do I mean by Land Values? and how do I relate this to photography

• It is a philosophical debate on humanity’s value for Land.
• It forms the basis of the argument for Land’s conservation.
• I need to explain how photographers have reflected on Land’s Value.
• I then want to ask whether this has created a strong enough voice towards a call for action in the preservation for Land.

From these simple points I now have a better sense and focus on how I can develop an extended written paper around humanity’s and photographers’ response to Land Values.  This can then form the context from which I can bring my Body of Work together, which has always intended to be more of a personal reflection on Land’s Values.

The two points that I want to lead my Body of Work are thus:

• A look at the changing ways in which I engage with and value Land.
• The influence of place and society on my engagement with Land.

By responding to these two points, I hope to still hope to have in the background those issues of place, memory and future aspirations.

All the above has probably been bubbling around in my head for quite a while as I have been developing the Body of Work and started the literature review for my extended written piece, but it is only since I have been able to set these thoughts out in this way that I feel happier that I now have a joint focus on what I am doing.  For those reading this, the above may seem quite simple and straight forward but I can honestly say that it has taken a lot of time, effort, thinking, drafting and redrafting before being able to write something so straightforward that actually covers everything I want to achieve with the Body of Work and written piece.

The next simple step is to deliver on these issues!

Aesthetic Strategies

As part of my research for Contextual Studies I have been looking into different aesthetic strategies for photographing land and considering what this suggests about the political, social and/or philosophical messages I want to project.  While that research concentrates on renowned critical commentary and associated photographers in their field, I wanted to use this blog post to look at my own photographs, the aesthetic strategies I have adopted in the past, and the critical implications of those decisions.  I am hoping that this will help me to contextualise the decisions I am current making on the appropriate aesthetic strategy for my images in the Body of Work.

I start this review with what I regard as a typically picturesque view.  It is an early morning seascape with Bamburgh Castle in the distance – one of the most photographed castles in the UK.It is not a style that I often replicate but sometimes I can’t resist.

It suffers from the typical criticism of the picturesque, which is that as an idealised view it is a misrepresentation of the “social, ecological or political status of land” (Bate, 2008).  It is also difficult, when considering the volume of similarly picturesque views that continue to be photographed, to describe it as transcendental in the manner that Ansel Adam’s landscape views might have been some 80 years ago. Its main positive aspect is that it’s commonly beautiful view remains popular with audiences with a lesser understanding of contemporary art – it is an image that many of my friends seem to value much more than I do.  In terms of critical analysis, it simply proclaims that I was there at a particular moment when the light conditions were as it is shown in the image, and that it represents an idealised painterly view of the UK coastline.  It could be argued that, as I have presented it in a pleasant way, it also represents a view that I value, but it’s commonality doesn’t add too much strength to this argument

In this next image I have sought to capture the orderly beauty of this subject.

Eliot Porter was one of the first photographer’s to use colour film to photograph the ‘inner-landscape’, which continues to be a popular way of representing land today.  Critically, it suffers from the similar misrepresentation problem described earlier, of being an idealised composition.  Yet, for me, there is a more intimate relationship between photographer and subject, and thus presents a stronger argument that it represents my passion for Land and its intrinsic value.  An obvious counter argument to this is that it is only a singular image which isn’t contained within a greater body of work and thus isn’t evidence of time dedicated to this passion.

The following image is selected from my project ‘Found’ where I intended to photograph Land subjects that weren’t typically beautiful and then impose my compositional skills to enhance the aesthetics of the image.  With them I wanted to express my respect for their struggle to survive in what seems to be increasingly harsh weather conditions.

This has stronger critical merits than the previous two images as it represents a scene as seen and the key message of Land’s struggle for survival isn’t distracted by an overtly beautified or idealised view.  The viewer is asked to look further into the information that this photograph presents rather than stopping at its visual appeal.  There are, however, compositional skills involved in this image which help to entice the viewer to study further

Shinkle (ref) talks about the “paradigm shift” in landscape photography since the New Topographic exhibition held in 1975, which introduced a new critical analysis of Land while removing the aesthetic enticement of earlier photography.  In the following two images, which are examples of my two projects Lost and New respectively, I have tried to follow similar principles of avoiding aesthetically enhanced styles and simply present them as they were found.  The strategy being to present them as information from which the viewer can think about their underlying meaning rather than having to make aesthetic judgements about whether they like them or not.

 

The problem with these is that whilst they avoided the obvious trappings of an aesthetically beautified style, they are still composed from a straight-on viewpoint and thus not necessarily as I initially found them.  It could, therefore, be argued that their imposed aesthetic style is just as distracting as an aesthetically pleasing style, however, it does seem that it is a general audience’s bond with beauty that it the major distraction and thus the above successfully avoid this aspect and ask the viewer to think more about the information they portray towards their inner-messages.

The closest to a non-aesthetic style that I can think of is the snapshot style.  Photographs taken in this way tend to be shot as the object is immediately seen and thus reducing any further choices of composition for the photographer.  It isn’t a style that I am particularly familiar with using myself, however, when I was out with the camera with my young niece the other month it was interesting to see how she selected objects having not learnt any of the standard composition rules of photography.  The following images are, therefore, a selection of such photographs taken by my niece with a small degree of processing by myself.

 

To conclude, my Body of Work is currently grounded by the work I have already developed for the project Lost; a collection of images as I walked around my old housing estate.  This is a post-war Council estate very much designed in a Modernist style therefore the straight-on view is very much in keeping with the style of the architecture and hard landscape features.  As described above, it avoids the visual trappings of the beautified viewed and thus allows the subject to breathe and become a component part of the Body of Work, rather than be a collection of individual, aesthetically appealing photographs.  At the moment my Body of Work will therefore retain this aesthetic strategy which sits most closely with the photography associated with the New Topographics exhibition (something I will refer more to in my Contextual Studies).

Psychogeography and me!

Having thought about the last article I have just written about the objectivity of psychogeography, I have been giving some more thought to how this genre affects my Body of Work.  It is fairly obvious that I have been positioning my project Lost within this genre, which seems to follow a similar approach taken by fellow student Jodie Taylor by linking childhood places to memory and reality( http://www.jodietaylor.moonfruit.com ).  What I am starting to think about is that when I reflect on my own childhood it is exactly this wandering that I have lost – when I was a child I knew every single part of a small area of my estate because I wandered it all the time.  In adulthood I have lost this true sense of place by restricting my wanderings by often travelling from A to B by car.  I do also wonder whether modern families restrict this natural childhood enquiry of where they live by controlling everywhere that their children go and play.   Today, the only wandering I now do is when I go away to areas like the Lake District, where I use photography as an excuse to wander.  This forms a significant element of my project Found – a found sensibility towards Land based on what I find whilst wandering around the area of Borrowdale.

I am beginning to realise however  that, having just moved to Glasgow, I have an opportunity to use photography as an excuse to wander around the place I now live to see what I react to and better understand my feelings for this place.  I am thus planning to use this to start another project around my local area.  An extra benefit of doing this is that I can photograph around an areas that is more easily accessible to me, whilst also helping me to get to know the area I now live in.  It could also become a further foil to my project Lost, a sort of then and now review.  For now, however, I am not setting this as the intention, I just want to do it for my own pleasure and will then see how it develops later on.

The Objectiveness of Psychogeography

Psychogeography was founded in 1955 by Guy Debordas as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals“; according to http://www.psychogeography.co.uk/ (accessed 25th May 2014).

As far as I see it, there appear to be two main ways in which photographers approach this genre.  For the likes of Pedro Guimares in his project ‘Bluetown’, and Marco Barbieri’s project ‘Our Drinking Habits’, both have set out a code as the basis of their wandering.  Guimares’s code determines the location he will stop at to take a photo, with each photo in the series linked by this code.  Barbieri’s code is the choice of object (evidence of street drinking) before he then wanders to find that evidence.

The alternative approach is to decide on an area to wander to find what catches the photographer’s eye.  A series is then bound by the link between place, photographer and choice of subjects chosen in that area.

Debra Fabricius’s project ‘Urban Drift’ is a good example of this approach where she wanders along a pre-defined area and photographs what catches her eye.  This creates a commentary on that place along with its relationship to the photographer.

Jodie Taylor has done something similar in her project ‘Memories of Childhood’, where the area chosen is the place she grew up in and the choice of photos taken based on her memory of place.

Stephen Gill uses both approaches.  In his project ‘Billboards’ he chooses both the place to wander as well as the objects to photograph.  In this project he photographs the rear of billboards found on a set course he takes on his wanderings.

But the question being asked for this short paper is whether it is possible to produce an objective depiction of place from either approach?  The presumption is that by following a code to determine where, when or what to photograph you are removing this choice from the photographer and thus replacing it with an objective rule to follow.  There are two issues I have with this argument; firstly the photographer still retains the choice of what to photograph once they have followed the rule; and secondly, the code followed by the photographer has usually been created by themselves and thus is personal to them.  The depiction of place cannot thus ever be entirely objective.  At best, it reduces some of the randomness of choice which helps to develop a cohesion to a developing project within the genre of psychogeography.

Does this matter?  Not really.  Both approaches have their merits and create different dynamics between photographer and place.

Return to Studies

Just a quick post to announce my return to studies.  I have been absent for the last 6-8 weeks as I (we) moved to Scotland to start a new life and job there.  This has also meant time without internet access which has further restricted my studies and the ability to update this blog.  And so, as I am beginning to settle back to a normal routine, and internet access is restored, I don’t have any more excuses not to continue with my course.

Significance of a Photo

The photo below is probably the most significant photo I have ever taken!

Why would I make such a statement for what appears quite an ordinary photo?  In fact, ‘ordinary’ is quite a complement for it.  Visually its not particularly interesting, there is no real focal point, no clues towards a narrative, its not well processed, and its not particularly well composed.  Its the sort of photo that anyone could take but, truth be told, most people wouldn’t bother.

And so, if a photo can be void of these properties and yet remain significant then what is left to make it so?

In this instance, the significance lies in the reason for taking the photograph; which relates to the place, a childhood memory, and the theme I am connecting it with of something lost.  Over 35 years since this memory began, I decided to go back to this place and take a photo of it.  I didn’t particularly need to do this as I had my memory, so why did I?

When deciding to take this photo I began by pulling it from my memory bank and then let it float around for a while without letting any further thoughts settle upon it.  But I had decided that I needed to take a photograph to represent this memory and this is what I did.  It felt important to capture and contain this memory to make it more permanent and real – creating some kind of record or archive of a memory in my mind.

I appreciate that at the moment there is nothing to engage the audience with, therefore, I suspect that later I will need to find a way of doing this; most likely through words.  I do worry, however, that providing too much clarity as to its purpose & significance will begin to dilute its importance.  I will need to think some more about that.

Overall, what this has helped me to appreciate more is how ‘ significant’ a photograph can become even without containing the traditional methods of appealing to others.

A Changing Emphasis on my Approach

As I began playing with some of my ideas associated with Land Values I was of the opinion that my Major Project would reflect on how others value and engage with Land.  The premise being that it would become a commentary on how a lack of engagement and appreciation of the value of Land lies at the heart of our exploitation of the planet.  It was also intended to comment on how other environmentalist based photographers seem to concentrate on the more evocative examples of our destructive ways, rather than on things more local to an individual’s influence.

I have since decided that it might be a little naively ambitious to make such bold commentary on matters that I am only just beginning to investigate and appreciate; especially as I haven’t yet reflected on my own position with regards to how I value and engage with Land.  I have, therefore, decided that I need to start by having a more personal perspective on this theme if I am to convince others of its importance.  I already started moving this way as I developed some of my later Ideas and now think that this is the way to go for my Major Project.

This ‘About Me’ approach can then be used as the foundation from which I can begin to comment on how society in general values land; whether as part of my Major Project or beyond.