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!

Assignment 3: Essay Completed

It took a little longer than I expected, but I finally got the essay in the mail to my tutor this week.  Now the wait for feedback.  With my last essay for Landscape on Andreas Gursky I was quietly confident that it was a good piece of work, I was very much into the artist and thought I had something interesting to say - my tutor agreed.

With Robert Frank I am on less secure ground.  Rather than making the process easier the vast amount of published information, in particular Sarah Greenough's "Looking In Robert Frank's The Americans", made the task very much harder.  What could I say that was not simply a precis of what was already out there, 2,500 words seems like a lot, but is in fact a very short piece of writing.  I immediately struggled with the scope of the task I had set myself and quickly realized that I could not write a meaningful essay that covered Frank's complete life and works.

My initial thoughts had been to look at The Americans and analyze how it had changed photography, a kind of before and after with a brief biography of Frank.  My own interest in photography and photographers is very much orientated around this before and after.  I have collected photobooks by Hine, Evans, Stieglitz, Adams (A), and Steichen.  They all share a careful approach to photography, technically excellent and visually correct.  After The Americans came Winogrand, Arbus, Klein, Meyerovitz, and Shore, all embracing the snapshot aesthetic and publishing volumes of work taken with small cameras often of events and stuff that crossed them in the street.  As with all transitions this is not clear cut and happened over time, but there is a distinct PF and AF in american photography.

The problem I had was that writing an essay about this would be to rehash the topic once more and what would I learn from it?  Sure there is a historical element here, but I already get that.  3 feet of bookcase are testament to the fact that I have explored these photographer's works.  I still think there is value in looking at each of these photographer's contributions and analyzing them in the context of my own thinking, but not for my essay.

In the end I decided to make this personal and look at Frank through the lens of what I could learn from his development as a photographer, what did he do to get to the point of writing The Americans.  This meant asking questions about his earlier work.  One thing was immediately apparent.  Although we refer to the young Frank at the time of publication of the Americans, he had already been working as a professional photographer for 17 years by then.  So what had he been doing for those 17 years?

This became the theme of the essay and was the first time I had really looked at how an artist developed over time versus considering the finished item of a photograph or book.  There was a risk in this approach as my essay might not be "academic" enough, however, the key was that I learned a lot by doing this, a more conventional approach to Frank would have taught me nothing.  The final result is not really the point for me here it is the process to get there.  Writing the essay took roughly 6 full days of research and development.  During that time I steeped myself in the young Frank and his early photographs.

So what were the conclusions?  I finished the essay with the following observations about Frank and what I took from his development:

• The first is to think of photographs not individually, but in relation to one another, bound together by a common narrative.  Frank showed in his early work that this narrative need not be temporal nor linear, but a body of work should have linking themes that ask to be understood by the reader.  

• The second is to consider photography in the context of other contemporary movements, artistic, but also societal, to incorporate the zeitgeist into my work.  

Hopefully my next blog entry will be job well done, but if not, another learning experience beckons.

Assignment 3: down to writing

The dreaded essay, 2,500 words of torture.  Well, not really - I have spent much time prevaricating over writing the essay, but in truth it is the easiest of the assignments, a research project combined with a learning transfer.  My problem has been that the essay ties me to a keyboard, something I have spent far too much time doing recently, my photography is an escape from the office and computer.

However, I have 4 free days now, before returning to work; nothing else is planned and whilst I can think of things I might enjoy more than writing this essay, it is not a bad way to spend my time and is something that will grant a much needed sense of achievement once completed.  As ever getting down to it is the hardest part and as with all large projects the trick is to divide the work into manageable lumps that I can digest individually and then assemble as a whole.

The first step is research, learning enough about my subject to be able to say something definitive.  My subject is Robert Frank and the spin will be around how he changed the nature of documentary photography with his seminal work, The Americans.  Not terribly original, perhaps, but his work has been a constant influence on me for the entire course so far and I feel a deeper investigation will benefit my work.  There are a few threads that I want to investigate:

1. How Frank developed as a photographer, his learning processes and the route that led to The Americans. This is in a sense more interesting than the finished work of The Americans as I can learn more about my own journey from how he built an education in photography.
2. How Frank's work influenced those who followed and how he contrasts to those who came before - was Frank the pivot around which 20th century photography turned?
3. Frank's working method, I think this had as much influence on other photographers as his actual published material, he rejected the careful framing and calculations of Adams and Stieglitz, for what we now see as the seemingly modern funnel approach to photography, shooting thousands of frames and then progressing through a step-wise reduction to a final published set.
4. Finally, what do I take from this, what do I learn?  Why did I choose to study this man and his work?

My basic model for the writing the essay is the following:

1. Gather printed material.  I started with the book, "Looking in Robert Frank's The Americans" a doorstep of a book, hugely useful, but almost too much material.  I also have 7 of Frank's photo books, bother pre and post The Americans to use as a visual reference.
2. Search the Internet.  I have used the Wikipedia entry as a starting point.  In itself it is pretty sparse, but the references provide links to much more detailed information.
3. The hard part - reading all this stuff and extracting the elements of information around which I will hang the thesis of the essay.  Much use of highlighters and post-its (I cannot bring myself to actually write on a book - heresy).
4. Create an outline with the larger subject headers - basically a series of questions that I need to answer
5. For each subject header generate a paragraph list that ties the facts and quotes from my research into the framework of the essay.
6. Write a first draft
7. Review and think a while...
8. Write a second draft and get Heidi to proof read for me
9. Add in references and clean up for final submission

My biggest challenge at the moment is to avoid over-working this process, the essay should be a learning experience that helps me to place my work within a historical context, it is not an end in itself and as a 2nd year undergraduate I am unlikely to add any new thinking to a very crowded commentary.

Next step - read the pile of printed web articles and speed read the following:

I bought this 3 years ago from Amazon, was then an expensive book at 38 pounds, but is now advertised as 149 new (phew!)

Assignment 3: First Thoughts

Written around 1st June


A week ago I got a reminder mail from the OCA, my first one, pointing out that is was more than 4 months since I last submitted an assignment to my tutor, a little rude.  But OK, I get the point, in fact it is now 6 months since I submitted assignment 2 and 4 since I did any work on an assignment.  I have 2 reasons, the first is pragmatic.  I needed to slow down a little, take a break and pace myself a little.  This is my final course before commencing with the new rewrite of Level 3, a set of courses yet to be finalized and probably not ready until 2014 (my guess here).


Today: 30th July


Think I might have a motivation problem going on...


I started this blog post the day before I started a new role at HP, I am now an operations manager for a Europe wide team that manages the relationship between HP and large software companies (e.g. Microsoft) and service providers (e.g. Accenture).  In the 8 weeks since I started, I have averaged 60 working hours a week, I am just coming up for air.  My own fault, I could have gone with the flow in my old role, but I needed a new challenge.  The irony is that I am once again locked to my desk and desperately trying to think of a way of re-engaging with my course.  A year ago I photographed myself working for Assignment 1.

I have had a couple of False starts recently trying to get back on the proverbial horse, did a few projects, tried to enjoy myself, but the course is still a barrier - it truly is inane.  I still get the need to be creative, but in the 2nd year of my first degree I do recall that alongside the projects and out of class work, I spent a lot of time in the class being taught stuff that might be useful - ah well...

I don't think it helps either that my next Assignment is an essay.  I don't have a problem with writing essays, I even enjoy the process, but it is too much like what I do for a living.  After 60 hours in front of a computer my weekends need to be more than another 12 hours in front of the computer.  However, it is what it is.

My subject is at least refreshing and interesting - Robert Frank.  When I was thinking about who to write about, Frank immediately sprang to mind, his Swiss in USA appeals to this Brit in Germany, and his style is one that I find timeless and of value to emulate in the next assignment.  He also looked at society, not people, his photographs investigate the position of the human being within the fabric of both contemporary civilization and landscape.  I find that with this course I am being driven to study the person not the society, I think Frank will help to get me back to where I want to be as a photographer, an observer of the world around me, not a participant.

With Frank I also have the opportunity to consider his impact on photography and how he acted as a pivot around which the genre of social documentary turned in the 50s.  Revolutions never take a day and are rarely the result of a single persons actions, however, there is a clear before and after with Frank that would beneift a deeper look.  I have been collecting books of Frank, about Frank, and of his contemporaries to be able to learn and then build a thesis about this man. I am not yet sure where to go with this, but it will be somethign along the lines of a before and after, rather than a retrospective.

And yes, this blog entry did avoid me going a month without commenting on my studies in 4 years with the OCA.