EyV: Assignment 5, Photography is simple

Due 1st October 2019

Back - submission - rework - development - contact sheets - tutor feedback

Take a series of 10 photographs of any subject of your own choosing. Each photograph must be a unique view of the same subject; in other words, it must contain some ‘new information’ rather than repeat the information of the previous image. Pay attention to the order of the series; if you’re submitting prints, number them on the back. There should be a clear sense of development through the sequence.
Assignment notes In your assignment notes explore why you chose this particular subject by answering the question ‘What is it about?’ Write about 300 words. Your response to the question doesn’t have to be complicated; it might be quite simple (but if you can answer in one word then you will have to imaginatively interpret your photographs for the remaining 299!)
Make sure you word process and spellcheck your notes as they’re an important part of the assignment.
For this assignment it is important that you send a link (or scanned pages) to the contextual exercise (Exercise 5.2) for your tutor to comment on within their report.
Reasoning on the 300 word count for these assignment notes in comparison to previous higher word counts within the course:
Part of the brief asks the student to respond to the question ‘What is it about?’ in 300 words. The challenge is to find a way to express this simply (the title of the assignment is ‘Photography is Simple’). It invites students to ask themselves: what am I really trying to say? Am I being too complicated? Is there a simpler way of saying it?
Reflection
Check your work against the assessment criteria for this course before you send it to your tutor. Make some notes in your learning log about how well you believe your work meets each criterion.
Reworking your assignment
Following feedback from your tutor, you may wish to rework some of your assignment, especially if you plan to submit your work for formal assessment. Assessors will make an objective evaluation of your work against the assessment criteria through the assignments, tutor reports and learning log, so after receiving your tutor’s comments, review your assignment and write up any changes you make in your learning log. OCA, Photography 1: Expressing your Vision, pp.113-4

[16Sep19] Second and final draft.

The brief, ten photographs, one subject, each a “unique view”, with a “sense of development through the sequence”; my tutor commented “bring together all the skills you have learned”; 300 words of explanatory text allowed. WC35

“All the skills” suggests technical diversity, as explored in the course: shutter speed; selective focus; lens choice; lighting variation and so on but this alone would not be personally satisfying or aesthetically challenging. The main theoretical component towards the end of the course was Terry Barrett’s contextual analysis and his book Criticising Photographs (2000) uses this to inform definitions of six types of photograph, described on the relevant web page (Blackburn, 2019a). Thus, in addition to technical diversity, I sought to produce images in as many of Barrett’s categories as possible. WC91

Five potential projects were identified (Blackburn, 2019b) and work undertaken on two: Flowers and The Occupation of Benches. Flowers always seemed to present more opportunities and to have the greater potential for variation and an increasing proportion of the time available was devoted to it. The title grew to The use, abuse, misuse and misrepresentation of plants and shrank again to Plants. WC62

The brief prompts, “what am I really trying to say?”: answer, “that humans interact with plant life in a variety of contexts” and maybe add “often with little regard for the plants’ welfare”. And, within that documentary purpose, to produce some subjectively aesthetically pleasing and diverse images. There is no compelling logical, technical or aesthetic sequence, but I have developed a preference for submitting physical prints in a presentation folder, thereby imposing my display sequence on the viewer, using only prosaic, factual titles and leaving interpretation to others: I have been influenced by Michael Grieve (2019) and Barbara Stauss' explanation of Lorant's (1940) views on image pairing. Image selection is explained on the web site (Blackburn, 2019c). WC115

WC  35 + 91 + 62 + 109 = 297

References

Barrett, T. (2000) Criticising photographs, an introduction to understanding images. 3rd ed. Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing

Blackburn, N. (2019a) BAPhot: Criticizing Photographs, [online]. Available from: http://www.baphot.co.uk/books/barrett2.php [Accessed 7 September2019]

Blackburn, N. (2019b) BAPhot: EyV: Assignment 5, Development, [online]. Available from: http://www.baphot.co.uk/pages/asg_5_development.php#ini [Accessed 7 September 2019]

Blackburn, N. (2019c) BAPhot: EyV: Assignment 5, Development, [online]. Available from: http://www.baphot.co.uk/pages/asg_5_development.php#sel [Accessed 16 September 2019]

Grieve, M (2019) Inside Studio Stauss, British Journal of Photography. Issue 7,888, pp.89-92

Lorant. S (1940) Chamberlain and the beautiful llama and 101 more juxtapositions. London: Hulton

Technical details:

† with extension tube
‡ composite of three photographs