Self Evaluation
My understandings of the issues relating to the environment lead to the choices I made with regard to the subject matter.
With regards to the landscape aspect of the environment project I am very aware of mortality and the impact we have on the world, which lead me to consider our final resting place for my landscape images. We cause so much impact on the environment, and in the end that mark can be all that is left to remind the world of our passing. The graveyard images show, if anything, how we pass and are eventually forgotten, with no flowers for those who passed many years ago. It shows death and the cycle of life with trees taking matter from the soil to grow and thrive from. The seasons pass and the graveyard remain, whilst ageing with the seasons and the years.
With Regards to the cityscape aspect of the environment project, being a country boy at heart and not enjoying the ‘concrete jungle,’ I found myself drawn towards the strong concrete urban forms as a way of representing the city. Being beneath a huge monolith and being made to feel very transient in relation to the solidity and mass of the structure. The city images make me feel insignificant against the span of the bridge, and the space beneath it feels banal and infrequently used, a place defined by the structure and a place one passes through hurriedly. Even the water is controlled and directed; it all becomes sterile, and like so many city locations soulless and grey. It isn’t a place of fun or warmth and this is what drew me to it.
With regards to the portraits I decided to use a stark background that reflect the stark times we live in, and juxtaposition against the faith and hope of the sitter(s). People with hope and faith are a rare thing in this post economic meltdown, and in what some people call ‘Broken Britain’.
With regards to the object project redundancy links with this ‘Broken Britain’ concept and once I found the visual direction I wanted I continued to struggle to find meaningful significant references. Deciding to investigate the media, (newspapers especially) this lead me to realise this was a media specific image; who else would want such an image? In many ways I feel I chose subjects that were all difficult to research. I didn’t simply try to copy a well know photographer in every detail. I took some aspects from photographers work (for the portraits for example). I wanted to meet the brief yet make the images my own.
I’ve struggled with references having picked such diverse subject matter as The Salvation Army (faith), graves for a rural landscape, and the stark underside of a bridge for my urban images. I didn’t want a vista, and all of my images show an interest in what is more at hand, it’s a slightly closed-in view of the world. I suspect I have a darker more pessimistic view of the world and we live in an austere time.
With regards to placing my work, I live in a post modern era and none of my images are nostalgic, sentimental, avant-garde, or picturesque. They are contemporary to my life and experiences and my way of seeing the world. I live in a post-modern world.
The image I am most unhappy with is the first ‘Signal Hill’ pastiche as it doesn’t reflect the work I put into this image. One roll of film was destroyed by dropping it into a jug of fixer whilst trying to place it into Patterson tank in the dark of my own partially built darkroom. I went back (for the third time) and took the perfect images, which I blogged, and then annoyingly lost the negatives which also contained my best graveyard images too. This disaster set me back greatly and therefore the images don’t reflect my potential as I would like them to.
Other than the disaster with the destroyed set of negatives and the one set that were lost (after processing) the amount of work and the planning/scheduling of the work went reasonably well considering I am totally new to education and have no previous formal experience or training. I’m on the start of a (hopefully) long journey with lots of scope to improve and I still have much to learn.
These images (below) show the (digital photographs of the viewfinder for) images that were lost when the negatives were lost after processing
.
I had four pastiche images on the strip and eight graveyard images, but due to losing the whole set my Signal Hill pastiche falls short of what it should be.
