Assignment 5: Down to Work

Now that Assignment 4 is safely submitted I can move onto the final chapter in this course.  No feedback yet for the last assignment, but time is pressing and I cannot wait.  AS the OCA refused to grant me an extension I am under pressure to finish by 7th June, which as a result of a planned vacation is effectively the 18th May.  I must admit I am pretty unhappy at the decision, I completed the first 4 courses in 3 years, not the 6 allowed, so was hoping for some lenience, especially given the trauma of a close family death and extreme overwork resulting in illness.  Ah well, this is not meant to be easy!

So I have in essence 4 weeks to develop and complete this assignment.  I have the basics, location and concept.  I now need to develop these thoughts. My first task has been to revisit the East-West photographs I created last year and process them into something close to what I plan to submit.  I have essentially done what Ed Ruscha did with the Sunset Strip in 1966 and photographed both sides of Richard Strauss Strasse in completeness (well a block of it). Originally I formatted them as a pair of film strips each side on one A4 page - not very interesting.  I have now spent some time and montaged the photographs in Photoshop into two single lines of photos, with the East side on the top of the page and the West side below (as Ed Ruscha did with the sunset strip).  This can only work with one side of the street upside down, otherwise the photos are out of order on one side:

I formatted the images so that there were 3 photos per A4 page on the top and then on the bottom.  This is a test print using a laser printer.

For the final version I will use photopaper which will lend some stiffness as well as improved quality.  The biggest challenge will be joining the pages in a way that does not look tacky.  I cannot print as a single strip so must join the pages somehow.  I am guessing I need a flexible cloth based tape for this.

Individually the pages look like this:

These photographs set the stage for the study, they define the topography of the environment and now I need to look deeper at the people and the symbols that are contained within.

My goal is to capture the essence of Germany in 2014, through the mundane and the ordinary.  What are the signifiers that tell the story of modern Germany, who are the people, what motivates them, and so on.  This is not going to be easy, creating a compelling narrative will be a challenge, as will balancing the photographs of people against the objects that I find.  One thing is for sure, I am heartily fed up with taking photographs of people.  This whole course has focused on the human form as the object that defines social documentary - I rebel, I have had enough.  I want to look at society also through the shape of the environment we inhabit and the things that we place into that space.  I will include people, there are plenty in the above strip.  But not too many, enough is enough.