Re-shooting assignment 3

“Stone and sea are deep in life. Two unalterable symbols of the world. Permanence at rest. And permanence in motion. Participants in the power that remains.”

I’ve just re-shot assignment 3. In doing so I realise that I never wrote up a response to my tutors feedback – although I have annotated it on OneNote – which is my preferred method of catching my immediate thoughts. There is a reason for this failure – it was clear to me from Simon’s comments that yet again I had over-thought my supporting material and so confused the message I was hoping to portray in the images. And yet – I couldn’t get clear in my own mind how to say what I wanted in words. This in itself was quite distressing as I’m usually pretty good at coming up with words for my thoughts. Anyway, it was resolved by a blog post from my brother which quoted Stephen Donaldson, from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever and which I reproduce above.

Much as I admire Sugimoto’s seascapes, and find the philosophical approach he brings to them fascinating and involving I disagree with his premise in one fundamental way – the view is not the same as it was thousands of years ago – it is different in virtually every respect. The same is true for the sea and the sky the second before and the second after I press the shutter. The problem I had was I could find no way of expressing it succinctly – until “Permanence in motion” came to the rescue. Handily, there are rocks, and distant hill in some of my images – so “Permanence at rest” comes into play as well.

Simon also raised a couple of technical issues and I did not have the images to replace the technically less effective ones. In particular the shooting conditions resulted in the “permanence at rest” being rather blurred. I could simply have re-shot those images at an appropriate time on a separate tidal cycle, but that felt to me to damage the integrity of the series. How? Well the sea has two (at least) motions – the waves and the tide – and I did want to capture both of those in the same series. What I did not want to do was introduce long and un-necessary timescales. So complete reshoot it was.

I used Simon’s idea of having a very low tripod – I actually used a gorillapod to avoid inundating my ‘proper’ tripod in salt water and sand. I suspect I didn’t really need it as this weekend – when I did the reshoot – was much brighter than my original shooting date, but I thought I’d try it anyway. I was surprised at the difference in shooting experience.  The first series – without the tripod was all dash in, grab some shots, get out before the water sloshed over the camera. The use of the tripod made it a much more contemplative experience. Move 3-4 feet back from the current tide-line, level the tripod and wait for the water and the waves to come to me. Keep shooting until inundation becomes a possibility, pick up the tripod, move back and repeat the experience. No less immersive, but much more meditative – I can see a place for both.

So, in reworking the Assignment I’ll be replacing all the images and considerably tightening the text. I’ll also be making one further change – the title. The more I think about it the more I think that simply re-using Sugimoto’s title is a cheat. I’m really questioning his idea, rather than developing it, so I’m going to go with “Permanence" as the title.

As I’ve written rather a lot I thought I’d finish with an image from the re-shoot that I wont be using in the Assignment – the stranded dogfish I rescued on the day.

According to some internet sources, in the mythology of the Haida people of British Columbia the dogfish symbolises persistence and strength. And so perhaps here we have, in a single image, my opening quote.

Assignment 2 rework – the final picture

This has taken a bit longer than I expected, but that means I have been able to include a more active recognition of time into the final collage. I’m currently comfortable with the idea that the overall picture we build up of a place incorporates elements from differing seasons and I have made use of passing time to do this. I have also tried to reduce the regularity of the matrix on which the collage is based to reflect the differing priorities aspects take in our memories. Finally I have taken the opportunity to replace one of the images Simon highlighted as having a quality issue, and a second that I felt unsure about myself. The final images is here and will be worked into the final submission in the near future:

I did think about replacing the small grass picture in lower left with a much closer shot of dew-drops, but I think that wetness has sufficient dominance in the final composition without that so am leaving it unchanged.

The final thought is how I would display this, and I am tempted to suggest that I would suspend the images individually so that from a distance and viewed from eye level they appeared essentially as the single image above, but on closer inspection, or by moving around, the relative size and importance of the images would vary, and interaction would cause the pictures to move slightly relative to each other – in much the same way that thinking to hard about a memory appears to alter it in some ways.

I also wonder if, as an installation, it would not be relatively simple to augment the overall image with new additions, and allow some to fade or simply remove them altogether, so that the installation changed over time as our memory would.

Assignment 1: Tutor Feedback

Been several weeks now since I got my tutors feedback on Assignment 1, but I wanted to have  a chat with him about a couple of things before writing up my reflections/thoughts/reactions etc. Done that now and as with the previous couple of calls it has been very helpful in sorting out some things running around my head.

Purely practical

A couple of the comments are purely practical and, as I agree with them, can be implemented without further ado. Springboard diving – Image 3: a slightly tighter crop at the top to reduce the amount of background seems very sensible, as does the suggestion to do something about the extraneous blackbird in Image 5 – Rifle Final

Image alignment with concept and assignment

Image 10 – Beach volleyball: Simon felt this was being shoehorned into the concept, and on reflection I think I agree with this. In particular his point that the beach is too dark to be seen seems spot on. I obviously can’t retake it as that defeats the concept so I may have to substitute another image/sport. In the Jari Silomaki set I referenced the link between the image and the news item is sometimes tenuous at best, but in my case I am trying to engage in visual punnery so I feel different ‘rules’ apply.

In a related vein he notes that the opening and closing images suit the concept well but it wasn’t clear what they said about summer. In mind at least the first was intended as a comment about the peacefulness on summer in my part of Cumbria (in contrast to the madness of the opening ceremony), and the second made a point about how rapidly summer fades. I have a couple of choices: the first is to change the shots – but then I lose the top and tail of the set. The second is to explain my thinking more clearly – so I’ll be going for that option.

Tension between the allegory and the assignment and final portfolio

By this I mean that some of the images suit the sports well but maybe illustrate the feeling of season less well. I was aware of this tension as I proceeded, especially as the concept required that I take photos in less than summery conditions. While I acknowledge it as a tension I believe it is something I have to live with. The simple truth is that summer in my bit of Cumbria is frequently damp and grey – I can choose to pretend it isn’t so, or I can represent as it is. In the context of this isolated assignment I saw no issue with this. For me this particular summer was about the Olympics, and if I didn’t capture that idea in some shape or form I would be missing an important facet of the summer.

This lack of summeriness also provides some tensions for the final portfolio. Would I be able to find other major events to hang the other seasons off, and how do I differentiate the summer shots from spring or autumn (as Simon pointed out). Had I carried this concept forward I might well have found that I was forced into a less honest edit with some essentially false seasonal differentiation, and a much weaker concept because I would not have had the headline events to hang the future images on.

In reality however I was already fairly committed to this idea before the penny dropped that I really need to use the course as an opportunity for exploring my interests photographically, rather than as a set of exercises to be completed in a tick box sort of way. My final conversation with Simon was about the potential for submitting this assignment, and substituting three entirely different images in the final portfolio. Happily we have agreed, and I have confirmed with the office, that this is appropriate given that I have now had an opportunity to think about the overall direction of my interests.

For me this was another key piece of learning – a lightbulb moment – a clear concept certainly helps with a brief, but even more important – at least in the context of academic study - is a clear concept that fits into a structure, so that I am not simply leaping from one unrelated idea to the next.  If I want to take my photography beyond simply shooting whatever comes to mind I need to understand what it is that interests me and why, and then work out how I can use photography to investigate it.

I think that my recent posts show a couple of clear threads – one associated with perspective, and one associated with the idea of portraying time in a single image. I haven’t got my thoughts quite clear on these yet, but I’m pretty sure that’s the direction in which my final portfolio lies.

For the meantime this has been an extremely useful assignment. I need to make it as good as I can, make sure I heed the lessons and move on. The next challenge is taking these thoughts forward into Assignment 2.

People and Place Assessor’s Feedback

In full it reads:

Continue to develop your practise alongside contextual research to create more consistent and clearly resolved bodies of work. Build upon your strengths of reflection on your work and the work of others. Focus future research around some of the key themes you have identified in your projects

A couple of things jump out at me here. The first sentence in some ways parallels the advice of Sir Joshua Reynolds which I identified in my previous coursework:

“A student unacquainted with the attempts of former adventurers is always apt to overrate his own abilities, to mistake the most trifling excursions for discoveries of moment, and every coast new to him for a new-found country”.

Given my scientific background I had assumed that research would come naturally but, in the context of an arts degree, it doesn’t. Fortunately the course reading list has a potential solution so I’ve got hold of a copy of Behind the Image: Research in Photographyby Fox and Caruana to give me a framework. I’ve also resolved to make more effort to get to significant exhibitions so that I can view more photography. All this ties in nicely with my tutors suggestion to do a bit of mind mapping and identify some threads to follow.

On the back of this I also need to take a rather more analytical approach to my photography – rather than just machine gunning and selecting. The latter has its place, but if I’m trying to develop a theme I perhaps need to be a bit more focussed.

The last sentence relates to this as well. If I look back at my response to the projects in People and Place there is no clear link between them – I’ve simply gone with what I fancied at the time rather than developing a clear photographic path. This doesn’t mean I need to slavishly follow one path though – I was listening to Jeff Wall on a Tate Gallery video yesterday and I was struck by the fact that he followed several different threads. The key issue was he understood why he was following them – they weren’t, ultimately, just a set of whims.

I’ve already made a bit of this mistake with Assignment 1 where I’ve settled on an idea and gone with it in isolation. I think it stands alone reasonably well, but I shall have to see what my tutor makes of it. I’m hoping that I can start again with my final portfolio as I have a much clearer idea of how I would like to develop it than I did 2 months ago. All I have to do now is stay focussed – not really one of my strong points – but I need a challenge.