Assignment 3: Tutor Feedback

The feedback on my critical essay was mixed, not bad, but not great either.  I am OK with that as this piece of work was a re-connection with my studies after a long absence and as such was something of a new beginning.  The feedback was excellent in content and the advice given something that I will take to heart as I move towards the completion of this course.

To begin, all was not bad:

"Your submission not only succeeds and meets the brief well, but also addresses an aspect of Robert Frank and his work that is more unusual, relevant to your own work and made more interesting as a result."

The essay had done what I wanted it to do, to explore an aspect of Robert Frank outside the usual analysis of "The Americans".  It also connected to my own work.

However, there were a number of flaws in the essay, some of which I was aware of when I submitted the work and chose to ignore. The first and most critical comment is that the essay is overly personal and that the introduction and conclusion are too lengthy.  There was a reason for this.  I was struggling to reconnect to my work and had just stepped back from a decision to abandon the course and the OCA altogether.  I very deliberately used this essay as a way to connect my work and personal experience of photography to Robert Frank and his development as a young artist.

This made for a rather uncontroversial and reflective account of Frank's work which whilst intended, maybe did not make for such interesting reading.  An interesting comment was that my essay at 2,850 words was overly long, hmmm, advice I have had is the word count should exclude the bibliography and +- 10% is OK.  The essay was 2,572 words by my reckoning.  However, there is a good point here, I struggled to get my message into the requisite number of words, this meant that I could not dig deeper into certain elements of Frank.  My tutor called out the following areas to address more:

1. The influence of Brandt and Tuggener - I had much more material prepared on this topic, how Frank met the Taciturn Brandt who said nearly nothing to him, how Tuggener influenced Frank in the direction of social comment through photography and design.
2. Evans - Whole books have been written about the relationship between these two men.

I guess, I could have made more of the critical aspect by reigning back my own introspection, but that would have missed the point of the essay.  This was never intended to be a study of Robert Frank, but an analysis of what I am doing with my own work and where I am going.

One very apt comment referenced my conclusion:

A better ending would be to re-focus your points by de-personalising them; answer the question I pose in the revised title. You could summarise why you think Frank’s developmental journey is significant ; not only for himself, but also to others: the defiance of convention, the need to tie in with the Zeitgeist, benefactors etc.

By tying the essay to me, I did not consider how Frank influenced others that followed and how his work changed photography, but then again, that could only be done with extensive reference to The Americans, so perhaps I had limited chance given the topic of the essay.

A parting comment was a critique of my blog and it's lack of direction.  Sure, I agree, in the last year I have been all over the place, but that reflects my inner struggle to get back into the course, but also disenchantment with the Social Documentary course framework. Now that I am focused on purely the assignments, rather than the technique obsessed projects I hope my blog is beginning to have greater direction and cohesion.  The biggest hole in my work at the moment, is any academic reading or critical assessment of others work.  Two years ago, whilst on the Landscape course I was deep in this kind of material, for a period of roughly 4 years all I had read were critical texts and histories, I think I burned out a little on this material.  I need to get back into this, read a little more and most of all look at the work of others.

In conclusion the essay did what it said on the packet, maybe no great contribution to academic writing, but it did get me back to thinking about photography and most of all actually taking photographs!