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.
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