I have still only completed a little work for Assignment 5, well excepting the 8 foot long photo I printed last week. As discussed in my last post I have made a decision to step back and away from people as the subject and start thinking in terms of the social landscape. I am not succeeding at any level as a people photographer and think it is time to move on and think about where I am going overall.
When I think back on the courses I have completed thus far, People-and-Place and Landscape were the standouts, I enjoyed the subjects and the process. Social Documentary has for me been a nightmare, I dislike the over-emphasis on people as the only subject and cannot find an angle that let's my own views come out in my work. I have lost any spark of me. Assignment 4 was disappointing, good learning, but clearly a suggestion that I am not getting along with the course direction
So I now make the decision to reverse direction and return to the comfort of landscape, but I hope using this as a way to document society. On Saturday I got out with my camera and started once again the process of documenting Richard-Strauss Strasse:
This first image is still very much street, hang around for long enough and something strange will come along, in this case a bed on a bike.
However, I prefer this view. The reflection is a problem in the first shot, but not fatal. This shot, brings out more, the bike is part of a larger scene, the photo serves to define the structure of the street, but also illustrates that personal transport, i.e. bikes are central to our way of life here. This photo has a green message.
It is election time once again,in fact it is always one election or another, either the city council, the Bundestag, or the EU. Anyway, this amused me. The UK has Mr Farage and his little band of proto-fascists. Germany tried that, it didn't work out well. Oddly, neither did communism, yet Karl-Marz and Lenin are still potent political symbols. I think I prefer the close up.
This is another landscape shot, too similar to the bed, but showing the careful layout of the street environment and the care to make the world green. personally, I get more about Germany from this photograph than any personal close up could ever deliver. To me this kind of shot is documentary, it documents a place in time and one day might be a valuable record. The risk, of course, is that it is a record shot and then so what.
Contradictions. This is a Bio supermarket, everything has been produced at the highest ethical level, natural and non-poluting, expect of course for the lump of BMW that is used to go shopping for these natrual producst.
It is beer festival season again, this time the Spring Beer Festival, one of three 2 week long festivals that occupy the calendar. The festivals bring out the traditional, although slightly jazzed up in this case. each year there is a colour fashion for Dirndls, Pink was last year, Green is in this year. Not sure if this is a good photo or not, but it does say a lot about German society.
Cute...
My problem is going to be the essay element, making the photographs hang together. I am not telling a temporal story, I am trying to paint a picture of a culture. I understand that as an essay, I hope my tutor does too?
Anyway, clock is ticking I now have 3 weeks left to finish this...
No comments:
Post a Comment