Something good is taking place. Four weeks ago, I spoke with my tutor Laura about where Other Mothers was currently. To be honest, I felt overwhelmed by the material gathered, coming as it did in a mixture of images, text fragments and audio files. I felt swamped and worst still, stuck in that swamp. Although […]
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Words you never want to hear: “The best thing about your project is the title…” So moving on. Four main themes emerged from my first meeting with tutor Laura this week Flow, and how the story might role out from an alternative anchor point from the current chronological approach Loosen the sturdy grip currently in […]
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I’m captivated by Rebecca Simon’s Letters from the Past project. The moment that stopped me dead was the juxtaposition of a caught fish supping at the air, dying, with the grandfather feeding his granddaughter a bottle of milk. It is heartbreakingly raw and reveals how powerful combining or simply bringing close two otherwise mundane images […]
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“Family photography, as a genre, documents the ‘being with others’ of the domestic sphere,” writes Thy Pay, Elspeth H. Brown and Andrea Noble in their essay Feeling in photography, the affective turn, and the history of emotions. “These photographs record what Catherine Zuromskis has called ‘aspirational fictions’ that allow is to record ourselves and our […]
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Going through the various images thus far, I’ve become a little concerned that they are too “concrete” and less reflective of such scenes as they exist in memory. To try something a little different I bought a fog generator. The idea was to use the fog generator to create a thick and ambient fog and […]
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Do you remember it? a voice out of shot asks Musa Jackson, whose eyes are transfixed to the left of the camera. You can hear he is watching an event on a screen. You can tell by the look on Jackson’s face: Oh, hell yes, he remembers. In this short opening sequence of the Questlove-directed […]
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I was very lucky to have spent an evening online with Susan Mieselas and Matt Black (and many others in the audience!) as they outlined their long term mentoring programme. I was particularly interested not only in terms of my current project but in what comes after. What will my next project be? How will […]
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When I began my MA, my primary aim was to make at least one image of which I would be proud. That has now been achieved. During a week-long road trip, I was able to visit four of my Other Mothers in person. Fears about the impact considerable driving time might have on my photographic […]
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My FMP proposal seems to have been well received and plans for a huge road trip are being drawn up. As I weave together my approach before setting off and beginning the actual shooting work, I’m mindful of a number of comments and suggestions that have come in from a number of quarters – both […]
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“The chimpanzee babies most prone to extended eye-to-eye contact with humans,” writes Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, “were also the ones who had been separated from their mothers and were especially eager to reestablish any kind of contact.” Hrdy’s Mothers and Others, a study of the evolution of cooperative breeding, is turning into a gold mine for […]
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My Final Major Project, Other Mothers, explores non-biological maternality, the mothering of a child who is not the mother’s own, whether through birth or adoption (1). It will hold a tension between issues of loss, abandonment and displacement on the one hand, and bonding, belonging and healing on the other. The project’s epicentre will be […]
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It is done, at least for the time being. I’m really quite pleased with the eventual maquette for Other Mothers. I first tried a portrait A4 size for the project and it did not quite work. Instead I have gone for a cropped landscape which becomes more of a square shape in use because of […]
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Other Mothers, more than my previous work, demands text as an accompaniment. Each relationship is a micro-story which an a photograph or a photographed projected image of a photograph cannot, by itself, tell. My tutor Cemre was the first to suggest strongly that was the project in which text would strongly support the overall effort. […]
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“Museums and galleries are not neutral containers offering a transparent, unmediated experience of art,” writes Emma Barker in Contemporary Cultures of Display. She is, of course, quite right. Curators, critics and other opinion influencers, including collectors and artists themselves, not only play leading roles in deciding what is worthy of wall (or floor) space but […]
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Photojournalism of the most pressing and distressing events of our times is frequently rounded upon by photography’s best-known critical thinkers. We have Susan Sontag attacking photography in general: The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate – all activities that, […]
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Perhaps I would say this as a history graduate, but I firmly believe historical study provides the best, if often imperfect, means of understanding the past. Based nearly always (I’m excepting micro-histories here) on multiple sources – primary, secondary and historiographical – historical studies move towards an ever more refined and relevant understanding of what […]
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“Put crudely,” say Jo Spence and Rosy Martin, “reframing is a kind of internal permission-giving to change, review, to let go and to move on. “It is not a way of discovering the ‘real’ to see if it is ‘biased’ but of finding new ways of perceiving the past so that we can change our […]
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“A connected series of small books,” suggests Arpita Shah, about my ongoing work. “Or perhaps one book, but with some form of separation of the elements.” This is most reassuring, as I’d always felt my project was personal, intimate and understated, and would be best presented at close and intimate range, and kept on a […]
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I’m having to consider the difference between printed matter and beamed light as I switch up my route towards the Other Mothers project. Proper consideration will also, I hope, enable me to get best use out of my small, turquoise-cased, projector. My starting point has been to look purely at the differences in the process […]
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This module is proving very challenging in terms of project work. All of the contextual material – from Jo Spence to Maria Kapajeva – is fascinating but none is gripping me as overly relevant to my own work. I find myself as admiring their output from afar, on its own terms, without that sense of […]
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