Rather than see this as failure, I am taking it on the chin, it is possibly the most important learning experience I have yet to have with the OCA. In failure I can learn and adapt to a new view on what I create and how I present it. I will return to the Fest work and create a new narrative based upon my own experience of the Fest. This post is not that discussion, this post is about what to do next and how to develop further as a photographer.
I have learnt much during the first two assignments in this course. I can photograph people, both aware and unaware, I can work the street, I am not afraid of getting in people's faces, but I don't really enjoy it as much as I should. This is not in itself a problem, education should be fun, but some things are more fun than others. I am starting to see this course as part of the process of developing as a rounded complete photographer, building skills and an understanding of photographing the person, but it is not where I see myself going in the future.
I just got my marks back from the Landscape course, 75%, a good first, but with plenty of room for improvement. Looking back, there are at least 2 assignments in that course that would equally have worked in this one. The emphasis was on place, but people were almost always occupying that space. Although the current Social Documentary course places a heavy focus on people and people in close, the practice of social documentary is about documenting society. Society can be described and imaged in many ways, it need not be close ups of individuals, indeed I would argue that documenting society should be as much about the traces of people as the people themselves. In a sense that is what my Landscape course was about, the evidence of people in the landscape. One constant comment about my Fest work was that I did not crop close enough, in fact I had deliberately widened the angle to ensure that the infrastructure of the Oktoberfest was in the photos as I felt this had a key descriptive purpose. Clearly my instinct was still to place people into their environment, not to exclusively focus on the people.
Having now completed two assignments that closely focused on people as the subject, I now want to step back a little and perhaps do work that could best be described as a social landscape, to follow my instinctive impulse to contextualize human activity within the environment it occupies. To that end I am embarking on a short (or maybe long) personal project that examines the Isar river as it flows through the city of Munich. The city center is just to the West of the river and the original city fortifications extended almost to the river. The Isar is the origin of the city, the water that enabled people to settle here and the defensive line that protected the city. The Isar is an Alpine stream grown large, the water still pure enough to drink and even in summer ice cold with the melt from the Alps. In most places it is broad and shallow, but in parts has been channeled and deepened. Sometimes the banks are roads and tall buildings, elsewhere wooded parkland, but always changing, always interesting.
My study will cover the length of the river through the city, flowing for roughly 5 miles from South West to North East:
In this satellite composite the bridge at the North carries the outer ring road and is probably the furthest point I will explore. Walking South the green area on the left bank is the Englischer Garten, Munich's huge central park and the site for many of my landscape photographs. About half way down and to the left once more is the medieval center of the city, just opposite where a large series of islands split the river. The large oval area with white tents is the Wiesn, site of the Oktoberfest. Finally as we go to the south the river meanders and the shallow bed can frequently be seen. Normally this is a quiet and gentle stream, but in spring if a major rainstorm coincides with the Alpine melt, it becomes a dangerous torrent capable of flooding the lower reaches of the city.
My goal is to study the river and its surroundings, looking at how the river influences the city and it's people, and vice versa. I am not too sure where this will go and once complete what I will do with it, but I think it makes sense right now to do something that I want to do, not driven by any need to create an assignment or produce a photobook. However, this is a still a project from which I hope to develop and is a vehicle for exploring where I want to go photographically, especially as I approach my final year studies. There is an element of wanting to stay in touch with Landscape photography and not be consumed by the current course, hopefully I will be able to merge the two at some stage.
A few days ago I started this project, exploring the river from the bridge that crosses to the Chinese tower beer garden down to the bridge next to the Deutches Museum, a stretch of roughly 2km. Within this area the river has been straightened, but still retains a very natural aspect when seen from the bank. It is only when pulling back and widening the view that it is clear that the river is within and urban space. This is a part of what interests me about the river, the ability to appear perfectly natural and yet be very much a part of the city
Structurally the bridges are fascinating, mostly single span arches, they create a strange other worldly space beneath them. The following photo also illustrates the changing nature of the river. I am standing on the river bed, very empty now that it is winter. The upstream water that would feed the river is now falling as snow and starving the river of its flow.
Trees line the river, but in winter the buildings that fringe the bank can be clearly seen enabling the construction of layered images such as these.
As the river splits around islands, giant damns and weirs are used to manage the flow. In these cases there is an interesting juxtaposition of the massive concrete structures and the more delicate stone of the older buildings lining the bank.
So gar I have been working very much with a landscape aesthetic in mind, now I switch to something more aligned to social documentary. Sadly, or perhaps marvelously, structure along the river are heavily decorated by the local street artists. In places I like their work, here it creates a colourful strip along a walkway under a bridge.
Elsewhere the effect is less pleasing to the eye:
However, the city gets it, they stopped fighting the graffiti and in places embraced it. This passage drops beneath a major road leading to one of the bridges, enabling cyclists and pedestrians to continue to follow the river bank path uninterrupted. This used to be rather intimidating, now it has been transformed into an urban art gallery.
Conversely, there are areas on the river where the city has less control. Just adjacent to the Deutches Museum, Germany's pre-eminent technology museum, a parallel to the Science museum in London, things are less clean and well managed. In the gloomy underneath of the bridge, can be seen the detritus of ruined lives, syringes are scattered along the wall...
As I mentioned at the start of this post, I am not sure where I am going with this, I have no plan, simply a need to do some photography that I enjoy and that speaks to my own tastes and outlook. These images are that aesthetic, a description of a place and the evidence of people within that place. It will be interesting to see where this goes. Right now I am just along for the ride.
Good for you Shaun - this says a lot for your resilience and determination. I think a personal project is a great idea. I think I'm like you in that I always prefer to see people in context and 'with' the environment.
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