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.

Reflections on Current Photographic Practice. Part 1. Portfolios of Thematically Linked Images.

It has taken me quite a few years to understand what is meant by ‘Conceptual Photographic Art’ and even longer for me to produce a portfolio of work that might be considered to fit this classification. During my first OCA Level 3 course, ‘Your Own Portfolio’, students were specifically asked, for their major project, to produce a portfolio of 10-20 images and that there should be a stated theme linking the images. Things started off well for me, as I produced a series of images of people feeding birds (including Images 1a and 1b) for a project whose initial idea was to represent the different benefits that we get from feeding birds.

                         

Images 1a and 1b: “Feeding the Birds” from my major project for OCA Photography 3: ‘Your Own Portfolio”

If I had stopped after producing a dozen or so images of this type and submitted my major project work for assessment without further ado I would probably have done ok at assessment. However, I continued with my ‘environmental hat on’ and produced a further, much more diverse set of images in which I attempted to illustrate all the ‘bad’ things that we do to the environment, thus effectively splitting the project (and portfolio) into two sections: ‘what the birds do for us’ and ‘what we do for the birds’. In retrospect I should not have been surprised by the assessors’ terse comments when I had passed the course with a very modest 48% mark. These comments included remarks that I should have stuck to and developed the portfolio of people feeding birds and that I appeared to be more interested in the birds than I was in the  photography (a bit harsh, but there is more than a grain of truth in this).

So where had I gone wrong? Firstly, I had not stuck to the remit of linking the images via a stated theme. Secondly I had been swayed by my own emotions into producing a photographic project that tried (not very successfully) to make a statement regarding something that I feel strongly about. In doing this I spent a lot of time and effort working on a project that was essentially wasted – at least as far as my journey towards an arts degree was concerned.

Bearing this in mind, how do photographic artists at the cutting edge of current practice avoid the pitfalls that I fell into and produce work that is considered outstanding by their peers? Furthermore, what can I learn from their work that will help me to produce portfolios that reflect current photographic practice (as my tutor has recommended and as the assessors will expect) and is there any way in which I can do this whilst making a powerful statement about an issue that I feel strongly about? This latter question is very important to me, because I don’t believe that I can produce ‘art for art’s sake’ – I need strong motivation to drive me.

For this post I’ll look at a handful of selected recent image portfolios by photographers or ‘photograph collectors’ whose work fits the criterion of having an obvious stated theme linking the images. All their work has been critically acclaimed and has appeared in books and/or exhibitions. The portfolios would no doubt have received excellent marks from assessors if they had been submitted as a major ‘OCA Photography 3: Your Own Portfolio’ project! What can I learn from these works? Do I like them and, if not, why not?

Chloe Dewe Mathews: “Shot at Dawn”

In her critically acclaimed work “Shot at Dawn”, which has been published as a photobook, Chloe Dewe Mathews has visited the exact sites where British and Allied troops were executed (mainly for desertion) during the First World War. Following research by Mathews and others she photographed the sites as they appeared 100 years later, at the time of day when the individuals were executed. The result is a series of landscapes, both urban and rural. Typical examples are shown in Images 2a and 2b.

              

Images 2a and 2b from “Shot at Dawn” by Chloe Dewe Mathews

A number of films, television series and television documentaries have dealt in a moving way with this emotive subject. My problem with this work is that what for me is just a series of bland and rather boring landscapes fails to convey any of the emotion relating to these horrific events that I can absorb from the other media. Perhaps video, of the camera moving towards the place of execution, followed by the noise of gunfire, might have worked. Despite the variability of subject matter (although they are all landscapes) there is a clear, linking theme between the images. This series highlights a problem relating to my own work, which I have mentioned before: it is sometimes very difficult to convey emotion or even atmosphere in a photograph. My own opinion is that this (commissioned) work has given Mathews a thankless task. However, other very different (and informed) opinions are available!

Sam Ivin: “Lingering Ghosts”

Sam Ivin’s ‘defaced’ images of UK asylum seekers (e.g. Images 3a and 3b) were featured in the ‘migration’ issue of the British Journal of Photography (BJP) in September 2016. One of the images made the front cover.

                                                

Images 3a and 3b: Sam Ivin, “Lingering Ghosts”

The idea of defacing or hiding faces of people in photographic portraits is not new (BJP recently devoted a whole issue to this theme) but here Ivin scratches out the eyes of his subjects to remove the obvious emotional points of contact and leaves images that “reflect the pain, disorientation and anger of those looking for sanctuary” in the UK.

Ivin’s work (which has been published as a photobook), whilst perhaps being not entirely original, does clearly make a political statement and there is a very obvious link between the images. I admire his stance. However, I do wonder (and this is not to denigrate his work in any way) what difference his work will make to the asylum seekers, or the system that they face in the UK. Who will buy the book? How many artists and photographers have the power to change the world through their images whilst still working within the field of conceptual photographic art? Very few, I suspect.

Katy Grannan: “Anonymous”

Katy Grannan’s portraits of ‘anonymous’ passers-by in San Francisco and Los Angeles featured in the “Out of Focus: Photography” exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London in 2012. All the subjects gave their permission for Grannan to photograph them after she approached them in the street. The photographs (e.g. Images 4a and 4b) hint at lives well-lived, but perhaps without much reward.

                                            

Images 4a and 4b: Katy Grannan, “Anonymous”

I estimate that about 50% of all the portfolios featured in BJP during the two years that I subscribed to the magazine were portraits of people: the percentage is even higher when considering exhibitions of photography students’ final year portfolios. ‘People taking pictures of each other’ is still a dominant topic and it must be hard to find an original concept within this field. Sam Ivin (see above) succeeds and Katy Grannan’s portfolio works well because her subjects are neither young nor fashion models but ordinary citizens, many of them elderly, ‘snapped’ in a variety of natural but characterful poses. Is this work still valid as current photographic practice? Is it now necessary to add another layer of complexity to a portfolio of human portraits? I’m not a portrait photographer, so I don’t pretend to know the answer to these questions. What I do know is that portrait portfolios are pretty much guaranteed to have a theme linking them.

John Stezaker: “Marriage”

John Stezaker has made a very successful career as an artist by appropriating old photographs from flea markets and second hand bookshops, cutting them up and then combining them to form collages. Why he does this is not clear to me, so let’s call it ‘playful’ and ‘art for art’s sake’. His work, which is generally accepted as photographic art, has won him international acclaim. He has certainly carved out a very distinctive niche for himself. His work is original, based on clear concepts and within each series there is a clear theme linking the images. As an example I include two images from his “marriage” series (Images 5a and 5b), in which publicity stills, one of a man and one of a woman, are cut and then joined together to produce weird, androgynous, hybrid faces.

                                  

Images 5a and 5b: John Stezaker, “Marriage”

Stezaker’s work fulfils all the criteria for acceptance as conceptual photographic art, even if he is not the photographer. However, as with some of the other examples featured here, I have to question its purpose. For photographic art to make an impact on me or to stir my emotions it must be both aesthetically pleasing and have a purpose, other than to be recognised and lauded for its concept and originality. Stezaker’s work fails on both counts, although I’m sure that he won’t lose any sleep over this.

Eric Kessels: “In Almost Every Picture #14”

Eric Kessels and John Stezaker have at least two things in common: they were both finalists in the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize competition and they both work predominantly with appropriated photographs. Kessels has gone even further than Stezaker for his portfolio “In Almost Every Picture #14” by using the cast-offs from portraits of bathers photographed by somebody who made a living by shooting polaroid beach portraits of holidaymakers and then punching out his sitters’ heads to put them on to badges. Images 6a and 6b are representative of the cast-offs, which have been published in a book and also featured in an article for the December 2015 edition of BJP.

                      

Images 6a and 6b: Eric Kessels, “In Almost Every Picture #14”

At first glance one might imagine that Kessels is having a laugh at our expense, but closer examination reveals that there is a clear concept here and the images are linked by a very clear theme (the hole in the middle of the photograph, the beach and the sea for starters). Also, this work features in his 14^th book along the same lines and he makes a living out of appropriating and producing this work. Using true ‘Art Speak Bullshit’ Kessels has produced a rationale for why these images are important. It will not surprise the reader to know that I am far from impressed by Kessels’ project, which also presumably took minimal effort to put together, but I cannot deny that it is photographic art.

Annalisa Murri: “Then the Sky Crashed Down on Us”

I’m going to finish this review by looking at a project that impressed me and has influenced my current work. Annalisa Murri came 3^rd in the ‘Contemporary Issues’ section of the 2015 Sony World Photography Awards with a project in which she interviewed and photographed survivors of the Rana Plaza tragedy in Bangladesh, where an 8 storey building collapsed, killing over 1000 people. This was essentially a piece of photojournalism, re-telling the story of the tragedy through the eyes of some female survivors. What made her feature stand out was the clever use of monochrome double exposures, featuring portraits of the survivors blended into urban locations, presumably at or near the site of the tragedy (Images 7a and 7b).

                       

Images 7a and 7b: Annalisa Murri, « Then the Sky Crashed Down on Us”

For me, this portfolio fulfils all the criteria for acceptance as conceptual photographic art, in which the images are linked by a clear theme and form part of a harmonious set. Furthermore, I find the images to be aesthetically appealing and relevant to my own work, particularly as they have atmosphere and provoke an emotional response. Indeed, they influenced my decision to work with double and multiple exposures for the ongoing project – I have written a more detailed article on Murri's work  in the ‘Influences’ section of my blog.

However, I do have one concern about Murri’s project. Is it exploitative? Does it help the survivors of this tragedy in any way or is it used as a vehicle by the photographer to make a living and build her reputation? Photojournalism of this kind always raises these moral and ethical issues. Even Don McCullin, whose photographs of the human suffering caused by war and famine in the ‘third world’ did so much to raise both awareness and relief aid in the west, suffered from moral dilemmas of this nature.

Final Thoughts

The six very different projects that I have discussed in this post are, I believe, good examples of current practice in conceptual photographic art. The images in each portfolio are thematically linked and form harmonious sets. My reaction to each set has been very variable, however, and this says more about me than it does about photographic art. I tend to dismiss ‘art for art’s sake’, where the message is either superficial or relates to the artist’s own philosophy, which is usually shrouded by what non-artists might call “art speak bullshit”. I am more interested by projects that raise moral, ethical and/or political issues, even when the images are not particularly interesting. I am even more interested in projects that raise these issues with images that are aesthetically appealing and/or produce an emotional response. These are the projects that I want to talk about and share with others. I am still searching for the ‘holy grail’, the project that does all these things and also changes the world for the better. If I could produce such a project I would die happy!

Does my philosophy mean that I am not an artist? I need to look at my past to resolve this issue. Throughout my working life as a medicinal chemist within the pharmaceutical industry I had the goal of trying to discover a cure for a disease or, at least, something that would improve the health of people I had never met. I never achieved this goal (very few scientists do) but at least I tried. Now and in the future I have similar ideals: to bring my art to the attention of the world and to make a difference. Of course this is probably a pipe dream but as long as I’m trying to make art I will need motivation and that motivation will not come from potentially making money or gaining acceptance within a community that I hardly know or understand. Perhaps this makes me a perennial outsider. Perhaps my aims are not achievable. However, I will never compromise these aims.

Plan for a Future Project

During a visit to a recent exhibition with my partner I came across some work by the artist Imran Qureshi. Qureshi regularly uses coloured handprints and footprints in his work (see Image 1) and has developed his output to produce some quite complex and (to my eyes) aesthetically pleasing work.

Image 1 (Imran Qureshi)

At the time I wondered whether I could develop the idea of using handprints and footprints in my own work, with the plan of blending the prints with one image (‘image 1’) and blending the space around them with a second image (‘image 2’), so that images 1 and 2 were juxtaposed and each related in some way to the hand. I was quite enthusiastic about incorporating one or more images of this type into my current project, but felt both that any message produced by this type of image might be a little too strong and also that it would be difficult to harmonise the image(s) with those that I had already produced.

Dominant issues in my life, which are reflected in my day to day photography, are wildlife and the environment. I have now developed a plan for a future project in which the handprint or footprint represents man’s impact on the environment. As an example, a (preferably red) handprint could be blended with a photograph of a rhinoceros (I’ve got plenty of those photos!), whilst the ‘negative space’ around the print could be replaced by human activity and/or a man-made environment which relates to the illegal poaching and killing of rhinos in order to obtain and process their horn. Elephants, tigers or the many animals closer to home that are threatened by human activity and climate change, illegal or otherwise, could be the subjects of other images.

On paper at least this proposal comes closest to satisfying my need to produce work that is relevant to my major interests, has a (campaigning) purpose and yet can be considered to fall within the remit of conceptual art. I need to check that I will not be plagiarising somebody else’s idea first and it is very unlikely that I will start this work before I finish my OCA course work, but if I do go ahead before assessment I will write another blog post and perhaps include an example.

I hope that this blog post demonstrates that I am thinking beyond my OCA course work and trying to integrate the knowledge that I have gained whilst working towards my degree with major personal interests in order to potentially produce creative artistic output that carries a message – something that will be critical for me to gain satisfaction from producing any art in the future.