Assignment 5 – message or study?

I’ve been a bit tardy in writing up my thoughts on Simon’s feedback for Assignment 5 – mainly because its been a particularly busy few months but also because it raises some questions which I’ve not fully resolved in my own mind even now as I head for assessment.

The practical stuff first – I’ve corrected a couple of images in terms of horizons and alignment as he suggests and replaced a near duplicate image with one from a different location. I’ve not sought images of the same location with stormy seas or skies – that feels like a separate project. On reflection, and following on from my Assignment 3 shoot I think I prefer the comparison images under similar conditions. The final set is shown on the page tab at the top of the blog.

The are, however, two bigger questions that Simon’s comments raise. Am I trying to convey a message or am I simply studying something? And, do I include an artists statement and what should it say?

These images interest me – or more accurately the locations do. When I started I wasn’t sure why – I just knew they did. As I’ve noted in a previous post, I feel they fit with assignment 3 but I certainly can’t fully define the attraction. So the set had no message – it was, if you like, a presentation of my research.This does not feel unreasonable in the context of a single module in a course that lasts about a year. It seems to me perfectly legitimate to regard photography in this manner as a form of research, and IIRC Caruna and Fox make a similar point in one of the course books. The assignments can surely be a launch pad as well as a destination.

However…I think I agree with Simon’s point that some supporting text would be useful – and I’ve spent quite a lot of time pondering that in the interminable car journeys that form a chunk of my life. The result is the supporting text that accompanies the final image set, but it has a caveat. It’s my current best statement of what I feel the images are about but it may be that as I take more of them it changes.

That’s the best landing I can manage at the moment.