Up & Down

A new year, but no resolutions!  I don't need a change in the date to think about how to live better or start new things, this is something that should be part of each and every new day.  However, it does mark the end of December, a month during which I very deliberately put my OCA studies on hold. I needed a break, both from work and from studying.  Christmas is a hectic time with many conflicting demands on time, adding my course into this mix would just have created additional unwanted stress.  So I took a break!

Another motivation for a pause was mixed feedback from my second assignment, it was not really what I expected and I have needed some time to think about it and consider how best to respond.  I will address this in more detail in a future post, but the essence is that my tutor felt that I did not engage closely enough with the subject, that I was too impartial in judgement, and that I lost focus on the interaction element of the assignment brief.  The second point is the one that I have most difficulty with and will requires a major change in how I approach the remaining parts of this course and how I rework the images for Assignment 2.

My understanding of social documentary has missed the mark.  I am thinking about the subject as I would a scientific project, with the idea that I must document society, which with my prior education suggests an impartial and objective viewpoint.  In the work around the Fest, I attempted exactly that, to visually describe this immense social gathering, but trying not to let my own prejudice or viewpoint enter into the work.  The net result was that I described the event well, but there is little of me in the images.  I must remember, ART, not SCIENCE!  Art has a viewpoint, a statement of belief, an opinion on the world - it need not and perhaps must not be impartial.

Just after receiving the assignment 2 feedback I also got my grade for Landscape, 75%, a solid first!  Good news, but also room for improvement, although given where I am right now with Social Documentary, it is not going to be easy to do that with the current course. Looking a little more deeply, here is how the mark broke out:

Demonstration of technical and visual skills - 30/35
Quality of Outcome - 15/20
Demonstration of Creativity - 15/25
Context - 15/20

and the comments:

"Excellent, the progression is palpable through the course. Maintain that profound personal investment
into the following modules. You should continue to tune your appreciation of what makes for a
photographically fine print, there is a good development in print quality in the submission from
beginning to end but there is still a step or two to go."

As ever the feedback is cryptic and needs some thought.  My biggest issue is clearly the 15/25 for the "Demonstration of Creativity".  I think this points to my choice of relatively safe subject matter.  During the course I pushed the definition of Landscape quite far, but very firmly remained within my comfort zone, I think I need to push the envelope a little more.  Technically I have no real problems, something also stated in the SocDoc assignment feedback and I am roughly where I need to be with the quality of my finished work.

The comments are challenging,  clearly my printed work needs further refinement.  OK, but what is it that is still lacking?  I haven't a clue, however, I will in any case continue to explore what makes a good print and work to get the best out of my printing workflow.  Recently there has been much discussion on the forums about printing, with many level 1 students wanting to submit purely digital work for assessment.  I think this is mistaken, even if a photographer sees the web as their medium all will at some point need or want to print.  The photograph as a physical object in the real world remains, for me, the ultimate expression of the art.  Printing is a key skill to develop and not an easy one to master.  It is also expensive, but I think something that should be budgeted into the planning for a photographic degree course.  I am fortunate that cost is not an issue, for me it is time - printing is extremely time consuming, but so worthwhile.

So where does this leave me?  Good and not so good feedback.

I started this commentary with the clear statement that I am not doing New Years Resolutions this year, however, I do need to make some changes to what I do and how I do it.

The first clear input is that I need to make my work more personal, to allow my opinion to enter my work and use photography as a vehicle to present my view on the world.  In the real world of a working photographer this "view" might be that of the client commissioning some work, I currently have the luxury of providing that view.  I do think that I need to take care, a viewpoint can easily become a prejudice, and this can negatively impact how others see my work.  To help me to develop this further I need to spend more time with the work of other photographers and look at their work to understand what their opinions were and what the message is.  I buy a lot of photobooks and spend far too little time considering their content in a critical manner.

Secondly, I need to continue to refine and develop the quality of my final output, I do too little printing and need to be a lot more critical when I do so.  I have a carefully calibrated monitor to paper workflow, so I see on a print pretty much what I see on the monitor.  However, I do not examine the prints very carefully and still perform mostly global adjustments to my prints.  Work for assessment needs to be far more carefully prepared, each part of the print carefully produced.  I also must think more about how I balance images with the frame and where to crop.

Finally, I need to reassess what I photograph as part of social documentary.  I was successful with landscape, but am now struggling with the people orientated social documentary.  It is not that I find photographing people challenging, I am just not very interested in them.  An answer might lie in looking at the boundaries between landscape and documentary, taking the bigger picture, but still thinking about society.   The course is written with people as the subject, however, Social Documentary need not be about people, it could also be about the spaces they occupy, places that echo people.  With my Fest work this was not an option, however, as I look at Robert Frank's work I see many photos that would fit into the viewpoint.

I guess the bottom line here is that I need to spend more time thinking about what it is that I want to say and then develop techniques and practices that enable me to say it clearly and in a manner that engages and interests the viewer.