Assignment 1: Submission Notes

Well I finally got my finger out and assembled the 8 photos and video that make up my submission for assignment 1:


Introduction

Starting Social Documentary coincided with the beginning of my busiest period as an employee of Hewlett Packard.  My role in the company is heavily tied to the financial cycle, (the new fiscal year starting on the 1st November), from May onwards we move into overdrive to prepare for the upcoming year. On May 23rd HP announced that 27,000 people would be removed from the payroll.  The upshot was that my team ended up with double the work and half the people.  Long days ensued and as the days turned into weeks fatigue and stress became a constant companion, there was no end to the mountain of work we had to complete.

The OCA is relaxation, an escape from a world of numbers and deadlines into one driven by aesthetics and philosophy.  But, it is hard work and added to my “normal” working life the sheer amount of stuff I needed to do was becoming overwhelming.  Doing a little street photography as part of on-going project work was a welcome diversion, but developing and executing an Assignment was weighing heavily.

The nature of Assignment 1 was troubling.  Getting close to a person for a day, or the many days needed to develop a concept is something I am not comfortable with.  My normal photographic working practice is standoff and objective, perhaps reflecting the remote and very analytical role I have at work.  I spend time researching a subject, develop a concept, and then execute over multiple shoots.  During Landscape this often extended over months and included 20-30 visits to a given location.  So what to do?  I had potential subjects in mind, but all would require time I did not have and energy that was at a very low ebb.

Subject

Practicality drove my selection of subject; a portrait of a corporate wage slave struggling to get through yet another day.  In other words – Shaun Clarke!  To date I have not turned my camera on myself, concerned that this could be seen as a form of conceit without there being a good reason to do so.  On the other hand this was a good time to be introspective, to evaluate where I am in life and where I am going.

Such a choice clearly brought with it the advantage of access and a subject who was unlikely to get fed up with the process and tell the photographer where to stick it.

I decided to chronicle a typical long working day, trying to illustrate the confines of my world.  It would be a single day, but shot over several.  I habitually wear jeans and black t-shirts so continuity would not be a major issue.  It would have to be done fairly quickly, more than a few weeks and my hair would start to indicate the passage of more than a day!  I work from home so that took removed any issues of access and permission.

Given that I had a subject, a location and a potential narrative, the question was then how to portray this photographically.  My own feeling at the time was of being closed in; my home was progressively becoming a prison.  I rarely crossed the threshold of the front door and had no time for many of the normal activities make up modern life.  I got up, eat breakfast, worked for 12-14 hours, drank a lot of coffee, eat some supper, and returned to bed fretting about the next day and what had not been achieved on this one.  About the only non-work related activity was eating lunch and washing the dishes from the night before. The process of going from a disordered pile of dirty dishes to a neatly stacked drainer providing an odd form of mental relief.

The photographs would need to capture this sense of gloom and self-imprisonment, but at the same time contain enough visual interest.  They needed to tell the story of me, who I am, what I am interested in, as well as what I do on a daily basis.
 
Practice

Creating a convincing “day” in the life over a period of two weeks required some early decisions:

• Camera choice was straightforward, the Canon 5D2 would provide the flexibility I needed and is the only camera for which I have a time lapse trigger essential for the self-portraiture I had in mind.  
• The tight space I planned to work in suggested a 17-40 or 24-105 zoom.
• From the outset I knew that I committed to use available light to preserve the mood of my world.  For the sake of visual consistency I shot all images at ISO3200 irrespective of the lighting level. Even at ISO 3200 almost all of the photographs necessitated opening the lenses to f/4
• The only exception is one shot that included the 5D, taken with a Samsung NX20 with a 20mm lens.
• I rendered the photographs in B&W as I felt that would capture the way I felt better than colour.
• Most of the time I mounted the camera on a table top tripod (gorilla pod), occasionally using a full tripod when space permitted.  

Deciding when and where to shoot would determine the tenor of the set.  I wanted an honest and un-posed set of images, as objective I could be with what is an intrinsically subjective study.  Once a location was chosen, I selected a position for the camera that worked with the available light and offered a wide angle of view, conscious that I could crop the images later.  Using a timer remote control I would take a single shot to ensure that lighting, position, and framing was where I wanted it to be, then set the camera to shoot every 30s for about an hour at a time.

My goal was avoid taking a series of carefully planned individual images, rather to take so many that after a time I would forget the camera and simply get on with whatever task was at hand.  My intent was that this would result in a series of natural portraits with a documentary style as opposed to a home based studio shoot.  The 8 images come from 6 separate days but together represent what I consider to be a “typical” day in my life.

Although the guideline was to present between 6 and 10 photographs, I have elected to break that rule somewhat.  In addition to the 8 conventional images I am including a further 1,660 photographs combined into a time lapse video.  The 8 individual photographs capture moments in time, representative of my daily activities, but they fail to convey the sheer grinding monotony of being locked to a deck for an extended period of time. As I was already using time lapse for the “regular” images I experimented by shooting a complete day capturing a frame every thirty seconds.  The day I chose turned out to be longer than I had expected, but that was fine.

I placed the camera attached to the gorilla pod on a table facing my work area with a continuous power source.  I chose a wide angle of 17mm, fully capturing half of my home office space.  I set the aperture to f/5.6 at ISO3200 and opted for a JPG format that would enable an 8GB card to last a day, but permit me to render a 1080p HD video.  The camera was running from 9:20am to 11pm.  I combined the images in Premiere Pro at 30 frames per second, each photo occupying 4 frames, condensing the 14 hour day into just less than 4 minutes.  Prior to loading the stills into video I performed global edits in Lightroom, such as the conversion to B&W.

I made a few technical errors, the main one being that I left the camera on autofocus.  This resulted in the framing slightly shifting between shots, although I do not find the effect disturbing, it is quite reminiscent of the flickering of early B&W movies.

This document uses still photographs to create a vision of how I spent a day of my life stepping from one conference call to another.  It captures the progressive change in my body language as the day got longer and fatigue kicked in.

Learning

This assignment required the development of a number of techniques, new to me in terms of both the still photography and the creation of a time lapse video.  It also required thought about the development of a narrative that illustrated my world.  The approach I have taken with this assignment resulted in significantly more work in the edit cycle than in capture, although I am increasingly finding that editing (both from a selection and a processing standpoint) has become the larger part of project development.

The greatest learning came from looking at myself as a subject rather than a photographer, asking questions about who I am and what is it that motivates and troubles me.  Completing the time lapse left me in a state of shock, I really had no idea of the degree to which my body language reflected my state of mind.  I watched myself grow older on the screen.  Since finalizing this project I have taken steps to try and rebalance my work and personal life.  It is not easy, the corporate world is unforgiving and computer companies are not the money machines they used to be.  But I cannot continue to work 12 hours a day week after week.  In my small world photography has become a tool for change.

I have been reluctant to draw parallels to other photographers whilst presenting this work, however, I found looking at Larry Clark’s “Tulsa” and Nan Goldin’s “Ballad of Sexual Dependency” a source of inspiration.  I also considered Sally Mann’s “Immediate Family” and Annie Lebowitz’s photographs of the dying Susan Sonntag. Clearly what I have created here is a small insight into the life of one rather unremarkable man.  It does not compare to the works I have mentioned, however, I have learned that there is great value in turning the camera around to look at my world.  Even the mundane has its place in the record of society.

I start the day still fatigued from the one before, the shower a place of warmth and refuge and yet somewhere I cannot stay forever.  I cross my hands on my chest to allow the warm water to accumulate around my neck, a comforting feeling.

The light shining across my eyes was good fortune; it takes away personality from the photograph, letting the shape of the body tell the story.

First order of the day is coffee.  With this image I want to not simply illustrate that I like coffee, but also to include some clues about me, the knives suggest someone who likes to cook, the fridge decoration that there is a life outside, somewhere.

As with all of these images, the lighting is marginal.  I put the camera on the kitchen counter and it has captured the underside of the cupboard above adding to a closed in feeling.

This is where I spend my day; the speaker phone is relaying yet another conference call.  As I spend so much time in my office, I have made sure it is comfortable, good chair, multiple monitors, and a decent hands free telephone.

If I was to create a truly representative sample of my day, there would be 7 of these and 1 other.  This is my life.  Once again there are clues to my broader existence, the book shelf behind is full of photography titles.

Lunch and washing up, my favourite part of the day, from chaos I can make order, not something I can easily do in my job.

With this image I want illustrate my day, but also reveal a little more about myself, the racks behind again point to someone who loves to cook.

OK, I stop occasionally and do a little non-work stuff. Here I am gluing a Robert Frank book catalogue into my Social Documentary log book.  In the upper left corner one of the greatest self-portraits casts its eye on my project.

Again lighting was an issue.  I could have fixed this with a reflector, but that went against the ethos of what I was creating – but, I have brightened the dark side of my face in Lightroom.

Back to my desk. A faceless voice on the telephone.  I have yet to meet my California based manager of the past 2 years; he is also simply a voice on the phone.

I am unsure about this photograph; it is a very simple image, perhaps too simple.  However, it is very representative of how I see myself.

Multi-tasking.  Logging back onto my work computer whilst Assignment 1 clicks away.

I realized that there was little in the set that captured the fact that I am a photography student, so I have included a photograph of me creating this assignment.  In the end I did not use the images from this sequence, an attempt to capture the detail of my hands.  On the screen to the right, Assignment 4 begins to take shape.

Aftermath.  Relics of the past day sit on the coffee table.

Taken the morning after this is the only photograph that omits my explicit presence, however, it contains many symbols.  An empty beer glass, an ice cream wrapper, remote controls, cat treats and finally the hint of a female presence.  Heidi was keeping me going at the time; her absence in these photos is yet another damning indicator of a life out of balance.

A Day in the Life…

http://youtu.be/l9MZYDoYa0k