So here's my first real blog entry. In the last week an awful lot has happened. The days seem to all have merged into one, however i will try my upmost to separate them.
FRIDAY OCTOBER 29TH-
This day started off with a professional practice lecture which covered work experience. I couldn't shake the feeling throughout the lecture that it was going to be incredibly difficult to find a photographer to do valuable work experience with. I'm pretty open minded with photography although i know what i like and don't like and am very strongly opinionated when it comes to certain practices under the umbrella of photography.
My ideal placement for work experience would be to assist an up and coming UK or US based art photographer because the main concern for me is how i will make a living out of my work, and has been for a long time now.
After this i enlisted the help of Ross Brind (who was in my groups last year for both critical and visual practice. An incredibly talented and thoughtful photographer who has been a great pal since i enrolled at Nottingham Trent) for a shoot i had been planning in the week. I will explore this shoot more in a future post as i have quite a bit to say about it and couldn't do it justice in the same post as a whole weeks worth of other happenings. (I can already feel that this blog may jump around a bit more than i first anticipated.)
We then proceeded to the Nottingham Contemporary Gallery in the lace market district of the city to see British Art Show exhibition which is spread throughout 3 venues around the city:
- The Nottingham Contemporary Gallery
- The Nottingham Castle Gallery
- The New Art Exchange, Nottingham
This was a great exhibit and provoked me to think a lot about my own work. One in particular, a piece by Charles Avery, appealed to me while i was there and even more after i had left. Ross informed me after having gone away and researched him he had found out that Avery creates fictional worlds and his work is part of one of these fictional worlds. This links back to photography in the way that photography is purely a medium for 'cutting out' parts of the world that strike you in some way. But i could go on about that for hours so i might save that ramble for another post. (I hope that the pattern of every post i do, spawns a number of other blogs does not persist!)
SATURDAY OCTOBER 30TH
This day was not filled with much apart from one event which provoked some thought in me. I was at a party where one of my friends that i had known all the way through secondary school was present. After failing to go out to some bars for various reasons we decided it would be nice to have a catch up. I left her house at 2am (really 3am as the clocks had gone back that night) after a long chat and reminiscing about secondary school and college where we did an art foundation course together.
On the walk home i had two thoughts, neither one new, but they seemed to have a new weight and strength to them which made me consider them carefully.The first was what if i hadn't gone to secondary school at the school i went to and instead chose another school? What if i hadn't met this girl? This kind of train of thought could go back to my birthday (23rd August) where if i was born a fortnight later i would have been in the year below her at school. It would have put me in a completely new social circumstance. This wondering is seldom productive but i can't help thinking about it.
The second, not unlike the first, was more about the people i had met on the way to being where i am today. How they have shaped my life in some way or another. I have never been a huge fan of portraiture but at that moment, and still, i long to go after these people who have all shaped my life in significant ways and take photographs of them. I came up with the idea of real heroes. Last year i was handed a free comic for the promotion of a new television show and since then i have always wanted to do a parody of a comic strip. Marrying these two ideas of the comic strip and the people who have shaped my life made me incredibly excited. Taking out the over the top caped crusader characters contained in run of the mill comic books and replacing them with seemingly run of the mill characters who make real differences. Again, this is another idea that i will hopefully come back to sooner rather than later.
SUNDAY OCTOBER 31ST
Nothing actually happened on Sunday as is common practice with students the world over.
MONDAY NOVEMBER 1ST
We had a large format workshop on Monday. Learning how to use the 10'x8' cameras was pretty similar to using the 5'x4' cameras, just on a bigger scale. I discovered that i want to always shoot like im shooting with a large format camera. The amount of consideration that goes into the shooting of a large format camera is immense. even the slightest wobble will knock the focus out.
This kind of photography, considered, precise and thought through is completely the opposite of what some people see photography as now that the digital age is strutting up and down every high street in the country trying to convince each and every one of us we are professional photographers. Taking 2,000 pictures in a day and doing what i call 'playing the numbers'. Take as many photographs as that and the chances are you'll get a nice looking one to put on the fridge. This is not what i am interested in.
(Also, a quick note for those of you interested in the Photography night out that i have been coerced into planning: A couple of us went out on that night and think it will probably be best to go for a drink at Ride and then head to Coco Tang. As for fancy dress, something low key would probably be best. I thought a pair of 'geek' glasses that you can put on inside Coco Tang would be enough to distinguish the photography students apart from everyone else.)
TUESDAY NOVEMBER 2ND
Nothing much happened on this day. I was just doing book work and sorting out ideas for my next shoot. I had a thought that i might make a huge mind-map on my wall in my room to try and get half the things i think of out of my head, for a time at least. So far, this hasn't materialised.
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 3RD
This was a great day. Absolutely fantastic! I attended a guest lecture taken by a Lei Cox and was astounded by his work. His conceptual mind is brilliant. I just can't get over how he's gone about his work. I've often wondered how to portray certain historic events and been caught up in small details, only grasping them for a while until they slip out of my hands due to my own flawed perfectionism. Lei, however seems to think then do. It highlighted to me how my way of working is flawed, i think and then rethink, then rethink and then do a bit before rethinking. I think the lesson i learnt here is that anything is achievable and persistence is key (although i don't think i'll be making a mayday landing on an american monument in a microlite any time soon.)
I got home after going for a coffee and getting some social prints developed from the weekend at about 3pm. I remembered Ross talking the other day about a photographer who was looking for an assistant in London to show him around. A fairly vague job description so i applied for it anyway. Basically, to cut a long story short within two hours Paul Mobley had e-mailed me back giving me details of what he wanted me to do. He wants to take as many portraits of English people as he can while he's over here for 3 or 4 days. He said he'd call me tomorrow or friday to discuss. I was beside myself with excitement considering what i had been thinking during fridays lecture.
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 4TH
The lecture today was pretty interesting (although it didn't feel like a lecture, it was more of a screening.) We watched a few foreign language films including L'avventura and Fear Eats the Soul. I found them really interesting, not that this surprised me because i've always liked foreign language films (see 'Die Welle' a.k.a. 'The Wave' as soon as humanly possible!) One part that i especially liked was in L'avventura, when a woman escaped a street full of men gazing at her. She fled into a paint shop and to stay sheltered she asked the assistant to get a tin of navy blue paint for her. I found this odd because the film was shot in black and white. This is another idea that could be fun for a moving image project which i could come back to.
Film Still from L'avventura, 1960
(L'avventura on IMDB)
Film Still from Fear Eats the Soul, 1974
(Fear Eats the Soul on IMDB)
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 5TH
I hadn't received a phone call from Paul Mobley as of yet. I had told him that i was free after 12:45 so i could get on the train home and get settled. After working through some problems with international calling I finally got talking to Paul. He explained things about the trip in a little bit more detail, citing what kind of things he was looking for and what kind of equipment would be involved. I told him that i was going to try and set up a shoot with some rugby players at practice and some school pupils in uniform. The latter may be a bit difficult because of certain laws, so if they're under 18 their parents will have to co-sign any model release forms i think. Hopefully i'll be able to get in contact with my old photography teacher and he might be able to get some year 10 or 11 students to take part in the shoot in exchange for a half hour talk to the students or something along those lines (hopefully going under the headteacher who i am, to put it politely, not a fan of.)
Then Paul said something along the lines of: "Okay. If you give me a ring in the next week when you've had a talk to these rugby guys and have found out more about it and set up a shoot. Then I'll book my plane tickets over to the UK." This surprised me because i was on the train home, half of which the reason was going home for this job. I had been informed that the job was from the 8th to the 11th of Novemeber, which was in just a few days time. I called him on it and he explained that because it had been such a last minuite response he wasn't going to come over for the original dates as he was booking the tickets using air-miles. This kind of disappointed me because i had been telling everyone that it was this week and i've been pretty excited about it so while it's all going on, it's all very embarrassing now. He has assured me that he'll be over before christmas so hopefully in a couple of weeks he'll be over and i'll be assisting a successful independent photographer.
So thats pretty much it for that week. A lot has happened. A lot of great stuff, but its a shame it ended in disappointment. I'm looking forward to my next blog which i promise will include some of my work, most likely being work from my current project and possibly work that i produce this weekend (I'm down in London so i might as well make the most of it!)
Here are some links for people that have been featured in this blog:
Ross Brind- http://photography-at-ntu.blogspot.com/
Paul Mobley- http://www.paulmobleystudio.com/
Lei Cox (Top google hit)- http://imaging.dundee.ac.uk/people/lcox/home.html
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