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 us 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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