Having absorbed the lessons
following the Skype conversation with my tutor, his tutor report and some
follow up contact with him after my submission for Assignment 4 I am now moving
on with my project work.
I have been left with ten
photo-montage images which, once they have been harmonised to reflect
consistent aesthetics, colour, composition and blending effects, will be included
in the final project submission. I need to produce another 10-15 images to
incorporate into a final photo book. Before I start producing new images and
modifying the ones that remain I need to decide on a format that will be
suitable for incorporating these into a photo book. Having recently purchased
(at great expense!) and studied ‘The Photobook: A History Volume III’ (Parr and
Badger) I am minded to use a square format for the images, even though this
will involve a fair amount of additional work on the ten images that await
‘harmonisation’. The images would then be ‘bled’ to the edges of the page in
the photo book. Most of the retained images have been produced in ‘A4
landscape’ mode and I haven’t ruled out using landscape format (perhaps 10x8)
yet, but must make a decision soon.
Although the vast majority of
photo books contain little or no text, the written word is crucial in my story
and I still plan to format the book to contain text on each left hand page and
one image, which relates to the text, on each right hand page. This is the
format used by Adrian Clarke in “Gary’s Friends”, a book that has become a
significant influence as I have been developing the project. However, I have
now abandoned the idea of splitting the book into chapters and have returned to
documenting the story of my relationship with my mother over her final eleven
years in roughly chronological order. The text has been significantly modified
and re-ordered. Many images reflecting particular events in our relationship
have been abandoned and the text has been modified accordingly. However, some
events (such as mum’s falling out with her sister in law and also the
celebrations of her 80th birthday) are critical to the story. Here
the text has been retained and I will need to take a new approach to finding
images that represent these events but can be harmonised with the remaining
images. I still intend to incorporate at least two passages of text relating to
the illness of clinical depression (with accompanying representative images)
into the photo book, although I haven’t written the text or decided where to
put it.
One issue yet to be resolved
regards a graphical representation of typical ‘ups and downs’ that mum and I
might have experienced during one of my visits to her home. This was regarded
by my tutor as a “keystone image” but it cannot be harmonised to fit in with
any of the other images in the book. I regularly change my mind regarding what
to do with this graph: my current thinking is to re-work it in (2:1) landscape
format and spread it out over the centrefold of the photo book, assuming that
the book is produced in square format.
Following a significant period of
soul searching and planning, I now need to move the project forward. The most
difficult challenge, to produce new images that are consistent with the ones
remaining following my tutor’s Assignment 4 edit, will take up most of my time
although I also need to spend time harmonising those images that I already have
and ensuring that the new ones can be produced in the same format. Following
the completion of some more blog articles, the tidying up of the text and
making a decision about the shape and formatting of the images, all my study
time will be devoted to these areas for the weeks leading up to and shortly after
Christmas 2016.
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