Well, I’ve been working on the
“Photography 3: Advanced” course for around four months now and progress has
been slow. I’ve made plans and agreed the way forward with my tutor, following
a very useful tutorial session. I will be concentrating, for the foreseeable
future, on a single project which deals with a very personal topic: my
relationship with my mother and the deterioration in her health (she suffered
from severe clinical depression) during the final years of her life. I’ve drawn
up a project plan, which can be found on this blog.
Positive aspects of the project
are that it takes me well outside my “comfort zone”, whilst allowing me to
experiment with areas of image production, such as the use of blending to
integrate two or more images, that I am particularly interested in, despite
having very limited practical experience (most of which was obtained on an
earlier, now discontinued, level 1 OCA course: “Creative Digital Art”). The
major negative aspect is that I will be re-living some very difficult and,
occasionally, traumatic times and trying to produce a portfolio of work that
deals sensitively with a very personal issue, whilst conveying some of the
emotion associated with the story.
I chose to initiate the project
by producing a series of passages of text which dealt, roughly chronologically,
with periods and events in my mother’s life between the time of my father’s death
in 1995 and the time of my mother’s death in 2007. Each passage of text relates to one of 20 images that will eventually form the project
portfolio. The combination of images and text will be produced as a photo
book. Producing the text was a relatively straightforward, if somewhat
emotional challenge. However, relating the images to the
text has proved considerably more difficult.
Visualising and producing the
images for the project was inevitably going to involve much research and
experimentation, which is still ongoing and is likely to be so for some time. I
have several challenges to overcome. Firstly, my mother died nine years ago and
I have to rely mainly on formal, posed family portraits (some of which are of
dubious quality) for my archival footage. Secondly, I am finding the process of
coming up with a clear visual link between each of the proposed images very
difficult. I have considered using text, either within each image or as a caption
beneath each image, as a link, but am unsure how best to do this or whether to do it at all. I am planning to produce blended images or "double/multiple exposures" in every
case, but these plans are far more suited to some images than to
others. Thirdly, whilst my plans for some images are well advanced in other
cases they have not been properly worked out. Finally, the images that I propose to
produce may vary greatly in appearance. Some are best suited to a monochrome
interpretation (I originally intended to produce all my images in monochrome),
whilst others will look better in colour.
Bearing these problems in mind, I
feel that whilst the experimentation and research will continue I need also to
think creatively about finding a simple visual concept that will bind my images
together. As an example of such a concept I was interested to watch the section
of the recent OCA video relating to the final assignment of a level 1
photography student’s course work (link). Madelina Androne’s work represents
a simple, creative and very effective conceptual approach to the use of double
exposures, which works very well, both in my eyes and (far more importantly) in
the eyes of her tutor and assessors. It is abundantly clear that my biggest
problem as an artist is a lack of creativity, whilst I have also as yet been
unable to develop a distinctive personal style (both features were commented
upon in the assessors’ feedback on my submission for the recently completed
level 3 OCA course: “Your Own Portfolio”). Given all this negativity I feel
that I must take a step back from the detail of my images and try to come up
with a broad artistic concept that binds them together in a clearer manner. This
may entail using my images to inform the text, rather than the reverse. I hope
that an imminent major holiday will stimulate my creativity and that I will
return in February full of ideas and with energy to burn.
This blog has been regularly updated
and includes research on other artists dealing with family issues. The research continues, but it is clear that the projects that I have looked at so
far have been realised in a straightforward manner, usually featuring portraits
(posed or un-posed) of family members taken specifically for the ongoing
project. I have to rely on memory and archival images, which makes my project more
challenging (but also, hopefully, ultimately more rewarding!). I have also
looked for photographic representations of clinical depression. These have been
hard to find. One photographer, Christian Hopkins, has tried to represent his
thoughts and feelings (as somebody who suffers from clinical depression) in the
form of some interesting and imaginative self-portraits (link). I will place a post
about his work on my blog in due course. Although I have been through some very low
periods in my life I have never, as far as I am aware, suffered from clinical
depression. I therefore find it difficult to express the experience of clinical
depression through my photographs, although I need to try to do this for the
project. I strongly suspect that the experience of suffering from clinical
depression renders it difficult to express feelings and emotions creatively in
any form. A number of books have, however, been written by those with
first-hand knowledge of the subject and I have started to try to gain insight
into the illness by reading some of these. My research continues.
I have made a start at producing some blended images, to give me a feel for the techniques involved and to see how closely the picture in my mind's eye relates to the final product. At the moment these are just sketches, which will inevitably be re-worked or abandoned. Some of the images work better in my
eyes than others; all vary in style as they represent some of the different
approaches that I am trying. I am some way away from deciding how I am going
to integrate text and images for the photo book.
Despite the difficulties that I
am experiencing I am still totally committed to producing a piece of work that
does justice to the memory of my mother.
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