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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I’m fascinated by the work of Caroline Furneaux, especially The Mothers I Might Have Had. Furneaux’s project stems from found images of her father’s previous (before her mother) girlfriends and is a whistle stop tour of fantasy and imaginings sprinkled with a healthy dash of voyeurism and play. Her gaze across the images is playful […]
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I love narrative, I love story-telling. But in my current project Other Mothers I am facing a fresh challenge: A newly formed archive of atomised images drawn from other archives (family albums) both from within my own family and from outside. Each ‘mother’ has a file, in which potentially suitable images for project work are […]
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Photographs, says Annette Kuhn in Family Secrets, are “evidence”. “Not that they are to be taken only at face value,” says Kuhn, “nor that they mirror the real, nor even that a photograph offers any self-evident relationship between itself and what it shows. “Simply that a photograph can be material for interpretation – evidence in […]
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Much has been said during the week about a photograph’s relationship to reality, and what it ‘says’ about the world, whether and how what is said might be ‘trusted’ or ‘authentic’ and how a photograph’s iconicism or indexicality might shift over time. My own current work is largely autobiographical and involves feelings and happenings that […]
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I’m at the third layer of my autobiographical photographic trifle-making with respect to maternal abandonment. One module was consumed with trying to approach the loss of a mother through the eyes of a young child, using metaphor, light and fragments of my father’s writing. The second, with Becomings, sought to explore a fractured sense of […]
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I’ve begun an excavation of sorts. The ground to be dug is a growing mound of images from family albums, including my own. The work is part of a project with the working title ‘Other Mothers’ in which I’m attempting to…(honour? Declare love?) I’m not quite sure yet, but something, towards those incredible women from my […]
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Towards the end of the previous Sustainable Prospects module I had the growing impulse that the next stage of evolving my project lay in my ‘other mothers’. I want to explore my relationships with those incredible women in my life who, following my abandonment by own biological mother, have loved me, nurtured me and deeply […]
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Hey! So here’s my presentation considering where I’m at with my current photographic practice.
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I’ve begun to find the ongoing discussion about the impact of digital capture in photography really tedious. Fred Ritchen, in After Photography (Into the Digital), warns of “digital” photography as a “Trojan horse” that will both “end and enlarge” photography as “we have known it”. He compares “analogue” and “digital” photography to vinyl records and […]
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This week I realised (finally) I had become something of an old dog. An old dog that is a little loathe to learn new tricks. This week, we were focusing on digital marketing channels, particularly, it seems Instagram. Of all of the social media channels, Instagram is the one that gives me the biggest headache. […]
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The task: To pitch a creative proposal for Oxfam’s 2021 Secondhand September campaign. The result: Catwalk at Your Doorstep, which was a hybridised group effort which took elements from a number of different early ideas from our group members. At its most basic, the idea was to create a campaign that was especially accessible for […]
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Nail, hammer, ping. Boys and their use of string to create physical routes back to roots. Or, as Carol Mavor expands in Reading Boyishly: “I have seen my own boys do it: looping string inside and around a bureau drawer, up and over a bunk bed, down and through the axle of a toy truck, […]
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The image above has knocked me for six, as has the whole of Elina Brotherus’s work Anonciation. The image, number 32 in the series, is the penultimate photograph of Anonciation. It is the frozen end point in her burning yearning to become a mother. It reduced me to tears. “I’m showing this series of photographs […]
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I bought some rather expensive baryta paper a week or so ago with the hope it would add a little wow factor to some prints I was making for a customer. It is beautiful paper to be sure, with a gorgeous texture and just the right amount of reflectivity to reveal stunning pigment contrasts and […]
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I’m starting to feel quite excited about our brief for Oxfam’s Secondhand September campaign. Partly, because I feel we have a good pitch. But mainly because it is a potential commercial sphere I’ve never considered before – that of working with large organisational clients on a story/conceptual approach. I think I’d dismissed the idea of […]
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I was a little surprised at the excitement and enjoyment my children took in deciding my project’s destiny. I, on the other hand, had pangs of fatherly concern. And the ringing dictum that parents must keep their word… Since there is a strong element of play in my current project – examining the differences in […]
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I’m taking a different direction in my work for this module. In many ways it is an extension of previous modules, though more of a side alley than a new road. I want to explore the differences between my son and me in our sense of identity. My son is very comfortable in his own […]
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Why, oh, why have I never asked myself the most obvious of questions: Could I make a decent living from doing what I love and, if so, how would I do it? I know part of the reason for this. I love my current job. I get to write, photograph and produce television. So technically […]
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Some really interesting insights from fellow students this week on how they see/use research in project development. Analysing their responses, they boil down to three main areas: Professional context: What has been done before in relation to my project? How has it been done? What can I learn from the shortcomings or learnings from the […]
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