suecrook513802eyv

Feedback on assignment

You seem to have deviated from your original idea - to submit a series of images which showed people as they moved in and out of the frame as you looked down the dark corridor from an underground car park out to the street. You have shown the contact sheets from setting showing a series of different tableaux. This idea works well and fits perfectly in with the assignment brief (the decisive moment, as noted, usually but not always refers to street photography and your idea fits neatly into this idea. You also show the beginnings of some experiments with photomontage (strips taken from different photographs (?) all showing people walking along the same street. Again, this experimentation is interesting and definitely something that you could take further.

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You say that you could not further this idea with your existing photoshop skills and/ or the quality of the prints you received was not, in your opinion, good enough to make this idea work sufficiently? Firstly, this idea could be developed simply using cutting and pasting techniques (see Peter Kennard's experiments with simple cutting and pasting techniques here:

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http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/01/blair-selfie-peter-kennard-political-dynamite) and secondly, you may want to investigate further a lab that could produce better quality prints. Several OCA photography students use the Print Space in London and can order prints on a variety of surfaces at a reasonable cost. You may want to investigate what they have to offer: https://www.theprintspace.co.uk

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With the car park idea, I like the way that you presented the series of images on a contact sheet (or as series of small scale images against a black background). This format of presentation seemed apt. Have a look at the large light box piece produced by South African artists Subotsky and Waterhouse as part of their recent documentary project Ponte City, which documented the door of all the apartments in the massive Ponte City complex in Johannesburg: http://www.subotzkystudio.com/ponte-city-text-2/

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You have selected a different subject for your final submission, choosing to focus on a Horse show in your locality. This is a slightly more difficult - but not impossible - subject to fit in to the theme of the decisive moment. You have chosen to focus naturally on the horses themselves and the images that I feel are most successful in this series are the ones which focus only on the horses themselves as opposed to the horses and their riders and or handlers. Specifically, the images, which work best, are the ones where you have focused tightly on the horse itself and creatively frames its form. In particular, I thought the images of a white horse's torso and legs (severely cropped to remove and extraneous detail) was very strong and gave some sense of both the power and the scale of the animal. Similarly, the close up image of the horses mane and eye (shown in the learning log) focused on the relationship between animal and viewer in a very interesting way. Often, it's useful to produce a series of images using similarly compositional techniques (such as the extreme crop). There are many photographers who produce interesting work on the subject of animals including most famously William Wegman but also Charlotte Dumas http://www.charlottedumas.nl/four-horses/print/ Mark Wallinger http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/wallinger-half-brother-exit-to-nowhere-machiavellian-t07038 Jo Longhurst http://jolonghurst.com/docs/projects_images.php?id=1:1:0:0.

If this is a subject you are interested in researching further, look too at those included in the recent exhibition 'Beastly' at the Fotomuseum in Winterthur: http://www.fotomuseum.ch/PRESS.3.0.html?&L=1

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Your need to further develop you research and reflection section. Have a look at these two blog posts on a recent study visit for the expected scope of such posts:

https://keith513730.wordpress.com/tag/here-comes-everybody/  and https://educationaltreesurgery.wordpress.com/2015/08/10/kennardphillips-here-comes-everybody-and-the-war-on-war-room-2/

Student feedback on Skype tutorial

Assignment 3 – The Decisive Moment

After having a Skype conversation with Wendy my tutor, I have decided to do the following:

• Reshoot my original idea of the carpark project asap

• Do more reviews on books and exhibitions

• Contact ffotogallery to see if there are any short courses on analogue/digital black and white photography so I can improve my knowledge.   My local college are doing a film course in September on 35mm/medium/large format cameras, but I’ll need to check on course costs.

• See if I can get my old darkroom setup and working again

   

  One of the things I found I couldn’t get while doing this assignment was a way to display my work.  Recently I have looked into making my own book after doing a blurb book for the final assessment and bought a book on how to do this called ‘Making handmade books’ 100+ bindings, structures and forms by Alisa Golden.   ISBN number – 978-1-60059-587-5.  Would really like to produce a handmade book for displaying my final images.

• I should have stuck with my first idea for this assignment and knew Wendy would pick up on this, but got a bit bogged down with not being able to produce the prints I needed and the quality of the prints required.  Wendy has given me a couple of ideas which I hadn’t thought of such as using contact print size prints for final work display, so instead of going large go small.

  I changed the subject choice at the end for a couple of reasons.  I couldn’t get the photos to join together in photoshop and it just looked untidy copying and sticking the images down on a piece of paper and I felt a bit bogged down with it and needed to move on.

  Sue Crook

   

  Learning Logs or Blogs/Critical essays

   

  See comments and links in main body of the text

   

   

  Suggested reading/viewing

   

  See comments and links in main body of the text

   

   

  Pointers for the next assignment

   

  You should ensure that you participate in as many study visits as you can to ensure that you too can benefit from the group contact and discussion that they offer up. You may find too that you would rally benefit from one or two technical workshops at the ffoto Gallery in Cardiff if this is possible.

   

  To develop your research section further, take some of the references offered up in your reports and develop these into 1000 word illustrated blog posts investigated the artists mentioned or recommended.