Genesis, Evolution and Completion of the Project: "I Am Not There" (August 2017)

Genesis of the Project

My mother passed away in 2007, at the age of 83, after suffering for many years with severe clinical depression. She lived on her own after my father died in 1995, until a few weeks before her death. My brother and I did not live locally but we gave her practical support during this period, one or other of us visiting her most weekends. However, we found it difficult both to fully understand her illness and to give her the emotional support that she desperately needed, particularly in the final years of her life. Many years after she died I was still asking the questions: “how could I have been a better son?” and “Is there any way I can turn the frustrations and the regrets of this period of my life to some sort of practical use?” I vaguely considered writing a book, purely for personal use since there would be no market for a second hand, non-celebrity account of clinical depression in an elderly person, however well-written. I also considered producing a video presentation or perhaps some multi-media work, but this never got off the ground. I had some archival prints and photographs of my mother during her final years, but these were basically ‘family snaps’ of the type that nearly everybody who owns a camera makes, and they were not intended to be used as anything other than mementos.

When I started the current OCA course in late 2015 I essentially had ‘carte blanche’ to choose, with the agreement of my tutor, an area of interest that could be developed into the single major project which would define my course work. I considered a variety of topics for the project and wrote skeleton plans for how I could develop each of these. The project that I most wanted to work on, but which I found most difficult to plan, was one about my relationship with my mother during her final years. I forced myself to think more deeply about how I could turn this into a photographic project, given the paucity of archival material. I have been interested in producing photo-montages of images, blended together using ‘Photoshop’ software, since I studied on the OCA Level 1 ‘Digital Arts: a Creative Approach’ course many years ago (the course has long been discontinued). Shortly before I started to formulate my plans I saw some striking blended images by the Italian photo-journalist Annalisa Murri at the Sony World Photography Awards exhibition (2015). A year on from the Rana Plaza tragedy in Bangladesh, when an 8-storey building collapsed killing over 1000 people, Murri’s monochrome images blended the portraits (head and shoulders) of female survivors with images of urban settings around the area where the tragedy had occurred. I found the blended images to be both poignant and aesthetically pleasing. I have written about Murri’s work in my blog (Annalisa Murri). I considered how I could blend images in my own work and came up with the idea of combining one or more archival images of my mother and my family with (an) image(s) created specifically for the project, such that the image juxtaposition carried meaning for me and, hopefully, for the observer.

I sketched out the various project options and sent them to my tutor, Les Monaghan. It was clear from his feedback that he found the project about my mother by far the most interesting and creatively challenging of the various options. Given that it was my first choice anyway the decision to go ahead with this project was easy, even if its execution was (rightly, as it happened) perceived to be extremely challenging. Towards the end of 2015 I put together a full project plan and started work on the project.

Evolution of the Project

My original plans, outlined in a document produced in January 2016 (see the blog post), involved producing a portfolio of blended images, with accompanying text, that would be used to prepare a photo book. The book was intended to be just part of the assessment material, being accompanied by A3-sized prints and a multi-media presentation. The book would, essentially, be a picture story combining elements of the past with elements of the present. The task of generating emotion, atmosphere and, ultimately, empathy in the viewer through the combination of the text and images was considered to be key to the success of the project.

Work on the project was divided into three areas: research, producing the text for the photo book and creating the blended images for the photo book.

Research

I sub-divided my research into studying (a) the work of artists and photographers who use photo-montage to produce a powerful response in the viewer and (b) the work of photographers who document or have documented the lives of friends, family and close acquaintances in a way that can provoke empathy with the viewer.

 Influential artists who use or have used photo-montage, such as John Heartfield and Peter Kennard, were studied in detail. Artists who construct and then photograph scenes in order to produce visual and/or emotional impact, such as Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle, were also researched.

I was less familiar with the work of photographers who had documented the lives of family, friends and acquaintances and was grateful to my tutor for providing many useful references. The work of Jim Mortram, Richard Billingham, Rosy Martin and many others was researched for clues as to how to build a photographic portfolio of (family) relationships that provokes an emotional response. Others whose work I discovered during my research included less well known photographers such as Robin Grierson, Aviv Yaron and John Levett. The book “Gary’s Friends”, by Adrian Clarke (another of my tutor’s recommendations) was particularly helpful, both in advising me on ways of producing empathy in the viewer/reader, through the use of both text and images, and (ultimately) in providing a workable template for the design of my own photo book.

My research continued throughout the course of the project and is detailed in a series of posts for my blog.

Text

I originally wrote the text for the photo book as a single essay, dealing with my relationship with my mother in the years following my father’s death. I found the essay surprisingly easy to write, although emotionally draining. In particular, the emotions brought about when writing about mum’s final months were hard to contain. If this text could affect readers one quarter as much as it affected me whilst writing (and reading) it then I would hardly need the images! My tutor was happy with the text, describing it as “poignant and eloquent”. Subsequently the text was modified, split into sections, added to, subtracted from and moved around, but the core writing remains largely unaltered at the end of the project.

Images

The images would, of course, be at the core of the project and as such the majority of my course work was spent in sorting through archival images and photographic slides, planning and then producing new images (both at home and on location) and (most time consuming of all) creating blended images. By the time of my first assignment (January 2016) I had produced ideas for around 20 blended images, based on either events or passages of time during the period covered by the project. I had turned four of these ideas into blended photographic ‘sketches’ (rough blended examples illustrating what I was trying to achieve). Three of these sketches remain, albeit in somewhat different form, in the final photo book. As an example, one of the retained sketches in its original form (Image 1) blended together a photograph of the living room of my mother’s house following clearance (taken in 2007) with an image of the exterior of the residential care home where she spent the last few weeks of her life (photographed in November 2015). The image, which was intended to accompany a passage of text relating to my mother’s transfer into the care home, tries to represent emptiness and loss. I think that it works well and my tutor described it as a ‘touchstone’ image. Perhaps this image best portrays what I was trying to find when blending photographs from different periods together. However, I hope that the observer can interpret the signals in all the images in the photo book and understand what I was trying to achieve.

Image 1

Emboldened by my initial work and positive feedback from my tutor I set about producing around 24 blended image ‘sketches’ to accompany and relate to passages of text in my written essay. Some of these involved laborious and painstaking work on the computer, whilst others were produced relatively easily. In the end I produced 27 ‘sketches’ for my second assignment. Feedback was positive again, although it was clear that my tutor was impressed with some sketches more than others. A positive ‘Skype’ tutorial (Assignment 3) followed and I was encouraged to continue experimentation and develop new ideas. In addition to the images I had produced a graph, which attempted to portray feelings and emotions during a day spent with my mother in a pseudo-scientific manner, perhaps alluding to my background as a scientist. My tutor was very keen for me to keep and develop this graph, but to separate it from the images in some way.

By this time (June 2016) it was becoming clear that the photo book was going to be my primary and possibly only submission for assessment and I made some decisions about its structure, which would impact upon image production. Firstly I decided to produce square images only – this would allow me to ‘bleed’ each to the edge of the page in a square book. Since I had only produced A4 ‘landscape’ and ‘portrait’ images to this point I had to alter all my current sketches into the square format – a challenging task. Secondly I decided to produce a single book, with text on the left hand page and an image (relating to this text) on the right hand page. This familiar format, whilst somewhat mundane artistically, seemed to be the only way to marry the text and images as I wanted them to appear.

Things started to go somewhat awry during the second half of 2016. I created a dozen more image sketches, mainly based on specific events in my mother’s life, giving me nearly 40 for potential inclusion in a photo book. However, my tutor now took the time to review my work to date quite critically and his feedback for the fourth assignment made for uncomfortable reading. He only rated ten of my images as definitely working. Other images/montages were “hard to place within contemporary practice”. A tutorial followed and afterwards I had to take a long, hard look at where I stood. I had the text in place but only (at best) half the images needed for the photo book. For a while I was uncertain about how or indeed whether to continue. However, having come so far I eventually pressed on.

Taking on board my tutor’s advice about fitting my images within contemporary practice (and having revised my knowledge of contemporary photographic practice) I abandoned all but the ten images that ‘worked’ and started to create some new ones, based on the ideas inherent in the ten images that worked. Many of the ‘failed’ images related to specific events in my relationship with my mother whilst others were, perhaps, rather too naïve. I tried to produce blended images having more general themes that the viewer could (hopefully) relate to more easily. I also introduced a short new section of text and images (originally two images, but eventually three) relating more generally to the subject of clinical depression. I chose to produce each blended image 50% saturated; partly to indicate a blend of the past (monochrome) with the present (colour) and partly to harmonise the images and style throughout the book. Thankfully my tutor was reasonably happy (Assignment 5) with the end-product, with only relatively minor changes suggested. Later I split the text further for reasons of book design (see below) and added two more images but at last (in spring 2017) image production for the project was complete, leaving me with 25 blended images and one graph.

Completion of the Project

I had the text and images: all I had to do now was to produce the photo book! Using ‘The Photobook: a History Volume III’ (Badger and Parr) as a reference starting point (see my blog) and studying other photo books both within and outside my own collection I planned out a basic design for a draft book. I stuck with the design decisions described above and finally, being aware that I would need to produce at least one more iteration, I produced a first draft ‘softback’ photo book, using ‘Blurb’ as the publisher. This was sent to my tutor for feedback (final Assignment 6: ‘Skype’ tutorial and written feedback). In addition to my tutor suggesting further research and commenting on some formatting details the following significant issues were highlighted:

·         Softback or hardback? My tutor commented that “softback feels fine”, but I decided eventually to go for a hardback book, because of the more tactile feel of the cover.

·         There was too much text on some of the pages – I even had to use a smaller font size on a couple of pages. In order to solve this problem I re-wrote some of the text and split up other sections of text. As a consequence I had to produce and incorporate two new images (my last two) into the book. These have not been seen by my tutor – whether I have learned from him over the last two years will be left for the assessors to decide! However, I (perhaps naively) consider the very last image (image 2) to represent advances that I have made, both in terms of content and style, in the production of blended photo-montage images over the two years that I have been working on the project. This image was incorporated into the general section on clinical depression and is open to various interpretations.

Image 2

·         There was a problem with the graph (see above), which was designed in (2:1) landscape (‘letterbox’) format, so that it would fit across two square pages of the photo book. Of course the centre of the graph disappeared into the centrefold. We discussed ways that I could overcome this problem, including self-publishing the book, with the pages stapled together so that there was no centrefold. I did some research into this (see my blog) and for a while was minded to go down this pathway. However, in the end I decided to take up another of my tutor’s suggestions and hand-insert the graph myself as a ‘foldout’ onto a blank page of my ‘Blurb’ book. Given that I only chose to produce five copies of the final book this seemed a logical decision and the hand-inserted foldout graph adds a personal touch to the design of a very personal book.

The final draft of the photo book has now been produced. The book (with fold-out graph) will be accompanied by prints of all the blended images and a print-out of my blog posts (the blog will, of course, remain as the primary source of logbook information for the assessors). I will shortly be taking the book and other material to ‘HQ’ in Barnsley for assessment in November 2017 at which point my project, course work, degree work and a ten year journey of discovery, learning, frustration, setbacks, sadness and joy will have been completed.

Reflections on Ten Years as an OCA Student (August 2017)

Introduction

Now that I have finished studying for my final photography degree course I am in a position to reflect on all that has happened since I enrolled with the OCA as a student and embarked on my first level one course (“The Art of Photography”) in the autumn of 2007. In this blog post [which accompanies the post reflecting on the genesis, evolution and completion of my final project, “I Am Not There”] I’ll take a brief look at the highs and lows, successes and failures of my studies and evaluate how I have developed as a photographer and as an artist since I started out with the OCA ten years ago. I’ll finish by looking to the future – how can I use the knowledge gained during my studies to develop my own photographic practice?

 The Past – Course Work

When I started out in 2007 I had little knowledge of conceptual art and wasn’t even aware of the existence of conceptual photographic art. I had no understanding of words and concepts such as ‘postmodernist’ and ‘semiotics’ and assumed that ‘fine art photography’, of the type practiced by, amongst others, landscape photographers such as David Ward, was true photographic art. Photography was all about techniques and aesthetics for me and the OCA level one courses, in particular “The Art of Photography”, didn’t entirely dispel my beliefs. I enjoyed these courses and got good marks. However, the course readers and my background research had started to introduce me to new concepts in modern photographic art. I similarly enjoyed my level two “Landscape Photography” studies, which introduced me to the work of Fay Godwin. For the first time I started to realise that there was more to photographic art than aesthetics and good technique. I also appreciated that, like me, Godwin was a very driven person – she used her photography to make political points and to benefit causes that she passionately believed in, such as ‘the right to roam’. Having completed four courses in four years and got good marks for all of them things were set fair. However, I struggled on the second level two course (“Progressing with Digital Photography”), not being helped by having a very unsympathetic tutor who severely eroded confidence in my photographic techniques and equipment as well as in my creativity. The course took two years to complete. By the time I embarked on my first level three course (“Your Own Portfolio”) I was beginning to realise that I had entered the world of conceptual photographic art, but didn’t really understand it. By now I was attending numerous photographic exhibitions and was subscribing to ‘The British Journal of Photography’, in an effort to learn much more about contemporary photographic practice. I went through a period of being bemused by the photographic art that I was seeing and reading about and also of dismissing as irrelevant any photographic projects that did not appear to have an application or serve a purpose. This proved to be detrimental to my main project work, which changed as my study progressed from being a portfolio of related images (as it was supposed to be) to a photo essay on an issue that I felt strongly about. The assessors didn’t take kindly to this diversification, resulting in a disappointing mark for the first half of my degree. Again the course took two years to complete. Things have improved during this, my second level three course. After several years I feel that I’ve finally gained a basic understanding of conceptual photographic art, and I’m cognisant with current photographic practice. I’ve also managed to introduce some of the concepts inherent in current practice into the course work and I’ve used knowledge gained from previous studies to develop what I hope is a distinctive style. Again this final course has taken two years to complete but on this occasion I deliberately avoided trying to hurry the project along, in order to ensure that I avoided the many mistakes made in the past. Maybe I can now consider myself to be a true, albeit still somewhat naïve, photographic artist.

The Past – Studying

For me, studying for a degree by distance learning has carried one major advantage and one major disadvantage: both have become more and more apparent as the degree course has progressed.

The Advantage: I have been able to carry out the course work in my own time and at my own rate. Work could be fitted around holidays (some of which have been for three or four weeks) and tutors have been very flexible when I have asked for extensions when submitting assignment work. A lot of my work has been carried out at times of day or times of the year that most ‘conventional’ students would consider anti-social. As a general rule my studying has consisted of relatively intense periods of activity followed by periods (days, weeks, maybe a month) when I have been largely inactive. I have been able to fit my studies around my social and private lives. As I am a pretty independent, yet strongly self-driven person this method of studying has fitted in well with my personality.

The Disadvantage: distance learning can be a lonely process! Whilst the OCA encourages contact with tutors and other students in a variety of ways, this cannot be and never will be the same as having day to day contact with teaching staff and other students. On many a weekday morning I have been studying at home and have been unable to come up with a single creative thought. However, when I have visited art exhibitions with my partner the ideas have often started to flow. My partner is about to enter the final year of a six year part time degree in fine art at London Metropolitan University. I envy her the regular interactions with other students, even though she only goes in to college perhaps twice per week. What ideas might have been generated if I (a mature student) was interacting with the bright minds of students less than half my age and familiarising myself with their project work as well as my own? Of course I have visited the blog sites of other OCA students working on the same courses as me, but I do feel that I have suffered because of the lack of regular direct contact with other students - an inevitable consequence of distance learning.

The Present – What Have I Achieved?

At school I had no aptitude whatsoever for artistic subjects and quickly left them behind as I trained for and entered a career in science. However, my job did require creative input and, over time, I started to develop an interest in the arts and became a keen photographer. Photography became a passion following my retirement and when I started my current studies with the OCA in 2007 I was setting myself a challenge – to obtain an arts degree which would complement the science degree that I had obtained over 30 years beforehand. Of course I also hoped to improve my photographic skills, broaden my repertoire and develop my creativity.

Ten years later I believe that I have (assuming I achieve a pass for the current course) achieved all these targets. In addition I have been able to gaze through a previously shuttered window into the true world of conceptual photographic art - a world that I did not even realise existed ten years ago! Understanding this somewhat rarefied world, which is occupied by my tutors, other academic staff, art students and a limited number of fully professional photographers, has been particularly challenging but ultimately rewarding, even though it has extremely little overlap with my main photographic practice in wildlife photography, which has been developing alongside but largely separate from my studies.

More than anything, the completion of my degree course has proved that I still have the desire, determination and commitment to both set myself tough targets and to reach my goals, however long it takes! I hope that I will continue to have the drive to do this for the foreseeable future, although I will never again try to take on something as difficult as a full degree course.

The Future – How can I use the Knowledge that I have gained?

 At the age of 62 I have no need or desire to develop a career in conceptual photographic art. Furthermore, as I have indicated both above and in other blog posts, I am unable to reconcile the need for everything that I do to have a purpose with the concept of ‘art for art’s sake’. However, the research that I have carried out for this and earlier courses does suggest a way forward. I am passionate about wildlife and both saddened and angry about the way man is damaging the environment and bringing about the extinction or near extinction of species ranging from the very small to the very large (killing elephants for their ivory and rhinos for their horns are two obvious examples). The knowledge gained over the last ten years puts me in a much better position to produce both photo essays and portfolios of work which will highlight the destruction caused by man’s desire to dominate the earth at the expense of all other wildlife (and, in some cases, his fellow man). I have already drawn up plans, described in a separate blog post (Plan for a Future Project), to produce a multi-media portfolio of work based on these ideas. I haven’t considered how I will market this work, once complete, but the knowledge gained during my course work when studying the practices of other artists should be very helpful in this regard.

I don’t have a crystal ball to see how my practice will develop in the future. However, I will continue to try to use my cameras and my computer hardware and software creatively to develop ideas and produce results, until the point where I can no longer hold a camera. I will always be very grateful to the OCA for providing me with such a great knowledge base as a foundation for my future work.

"I am not There": Photo Book Design

Introduction

From the outset of the project I intended to produce a photo book as part of my submission for assessment. As the project moved forwards it gradually became clear that the book would be the primary submission document. This post describes my thought processes regarding the design of the book.

Book Evolution

Some aspects of the book design have remained in place from the outset. I wanted to document my relationship with my mother in her final years in both words and images, with each passage of text relating to a single image. I could see no simple alternative to placing each passage of text on the left hand page, with the corresponding image on the right hand page, separated by the centrefold. Most photo books contain little or no text, but for me the text was an essential part of the project. Other examples of photo books where the text and images occupy roughly equal space were hard to come by, but I did find a template in “Gary’s Friends”, by Adrian Clarke (Adrian Clarke), and this book has proved to be very useful in developing the design.

In the early stages of the project I produced a mixture of A4-shaped ‘landscape’ and ‘portrait’ images. Half way through the project I thought about whether to (a) retain the shapes of the images and place them horizontally (for landscape images) or vertically on square pages, with white surrounds, (b) convert all the images to ‘landscape’ format and incorporate them either ‘full bleed’ or with a white surround onto the appropriate A4 landscape-shaped pages or (c) convert all the images to a square format for square pages, with or without ‘full bleed’. Adrian Clarke used choice (a). However, both my tutor and I preferred to use a ‘full bleed’, so option (a) was eliminated. It would have been almost impossible for me to convert some of the (minority of) portrait format images into landscape format, so in the end I chose option (c), with full bleed, and converted all the images that had already been given the ‘thumbs up’ by my tutor into square format. All future images were also produced in square format.

For stylistic reasons I chose to produce 50% desaturated images having a ‘matt’ finish (very few glossy images appear in published photo books and a matt finish seemed entirely appropriate for partially desaturated images). I chose the images to be caption-less, since they already related to the text on the opposite page and the caption would have had to have been placed either over the image or below the text on the opposite page. From the start my square images were all produced at 300dpi and 2500 pixels length, for printing. I intended to use my favourite ‘Calibri’ font for the text, but eventually had to settle for ‘Times New Roman’, because the software that I used to create the book would not accept ‘Calibri’. A typical double page from the finished photo book, illustrating the design decisions that had been made by this stage, is shown below (Image 1).

Image 1: A Typical Page from my finished (Hard Cover) Photo Book

Book Production

Serious design considerations came to the fore after I had produced my first draft photo book, a softback version using the ‘print on demand’ publisher Blurb. The front and back covers from this book are illustrated below (Image 2). Feedback from my tutor included the advice that I should get my hands on every photo book that I could, not just to consider design issues but also to examine how the look and feel of the book could influence both the creator and the observer. I tried to carry out his advice as best I could. “The Photobook: a History Volume III” (Badger and Parr) was also consulted extensively. Some of the more important design issues that were discussed with my tutor, together with how they were resolved, are discussed below.

Image 2: Back and Front Covers of the first (Soft Cover) Draft of my Photo Book

My tutor was happy with the use of a soft cover for the book, but not with the gloss cover and bold text. For future drafts of the book and for the final version I used a matt cover and made modifications to the nature of the cover text (see Image 3). However, having subsequently produced a book with a hardback cover (Image 3) I preferred the feel and texture of the hard back, so this was retained for further drafts and the final version of the book.

I was a little concerned that the book, with pages approximately 17cm square, was a little smaller than I would have liked. However, my tutor was happy with the size so it was left unaltered. I chose not to number the pages of the book – this didn’t seem necessary and is not common practice for published photo books.

Image 3: Front Cover of the first Draft of the Hard Cover Photo Book, showing Text Design Changes

There was a serious problem with the ‘graph’. This ‘one off’ image was designed to be (2:1) ‘letterbox’ size, to fit across two pages. However, the centre of the graph predictably disappeared into the centrefold of the book (hard and soft cover). I considered a number of options. My tutor was keen for me to investigate self-publishing the book and attaching the graph either as a ‘fold-out’ or glued/printed/pasted across the centre pages of a book whose pages had been stapled together, so that there would be no centrefold. I looked at self-publishing, both by reading books and by visiting a photo book fair in London, where the ‘Self Publish Be Happy’ representative confirmed that a stapled book with blank central pages would be my best option. The graph could be printed on or attached across the central pages. Following this advice I carefully considered what to do. I thought about how many copies of this very personal document I was likely to produce – probably no more than six to eight for the assessors, my tutor, close family and me. In the end I decided to produce a ‘print on demand’ book with two blank pages. I then separately produced the graph with exactly the same dimensions as the book. I will permanently attach the graph as a ‘foldout’ onto the right hand of the two blank pages that have been left in each copy of the book. This will add a ‘personal touch’ to the book, whilst ensuring that I do not have to do too much work in order to produce the few copies needed.

The design of the photo book is now complete and I have produced a single copy that incorporates the graph, as well as all the other changes mentioned above. An image of the fold-out graph, attached to the book, is below (Image 4). I am happy with the overall result: all that remains for me to do at this point is to produce further copies of the book and attach a copy of the graph to each copy of the book. One copy of the book will then, together with other project material, be sent for assessment.

Image 4: Fold-out Graph attached to a Hard Cover Version of the Photo Book