CRJ Week 1
Falmouth University MA Photography
Module 1: Positions and Practice
23/01/2023 - 29/01/2023
Week 1 - Topic 1: Mirrors and Windows
23/01/2023
This is going to be short, mainly because my first attempt was long and meandering.
I have studied before, twice at University, but have never studied at this level. That is daunting. I have studied photography for some years now, but on reading, I need to reflect on my previous learning. A new method of learning, online. A new structure, working full time and studying. A new, and strange method of referencing, Harvard. A new discipline, Psychology and Nursing, while very possibly relevant, were undertaken for different reasons……….possibly.
Possibly? My thinking here was to study something I liked, so it wouldn’t feel like work, even though photography has never earned me more than the £2:00 I have sat in my Adobe Stock account, rather than studying something for professional career enhancement. Yet that is why I am here. Just doing something I like, but not! Fells contradictory, but I don’t think it is. I want to develop the skills to enable me to sell the images I produce, subtle, but different.
25/01/2023
I hadn’t been home for around 20 years. In describing home to my wife, I had talked about crab pots, cliffs and small bays with Fishermans huts. When I took her for the first time in the summer of 2022, I discovered something about myself and my perception of beauty. The things I found most beautiful and mentally settling were the signs of heavy industry, chemical works, a nuclear power plant and blast furnace and a coal slag heap. These had been the backdrop to my life. Like Ridley Scott in is film Bladerunner, I found solace, hope, comfort, joy and beauty in Teessides industrial framing to life.
Does this mean that there was no beauty elsewhere? Not at all. There was thought, beauty in the things I had remembered as ugly, horrible and dirty. So what did this mean about how I understood beauty and what beauty actually is? Not only this, but they tell a story, a story of my blood. My mum and dad met while he was contracting on the bias furnace, my family worked in the steel and chemical industries, uncles, cousins aunties, my grandfather was a supervisor in the steelworks, giving no regard for whether a worker was family or not. That isn’t to say the same things were true about the fishing boats and crab pots, I had worked on the boats, my cousin built and worked on boats, building crab and lobster pots, he could have done it blindfold.
Still, beauty in the “ugly” had really shocked and intrigued me.
26/01/2023
I explored beauty and mental health in some images I had taken throughout 2022, I guess they were a project, but never having completed a project as such, I framed them as experimenting. Long exposures in natural light, with no ND filters, just controlling aspects of the mechanics of taking pictures to get images which I felt were scary, yet beautiful. Ironically, in all this talk of beauty, I dislike, what I perceive as, the modern fascination with clean sharp images. I need to qualify dislike. I like seeing them when produced by others, each to their own, but I am not a fan of producing them.
I work, and have worked, in health health for a number of years and as I reflect on how I progress on the course and in the pursuit of building a body of work, I begin to wonder how can these come together. I wonder how I can, wishing my ethical bounds, create work that displays beauty where, perhaps, beauty is considered absent.
28/01/2023
Windows and Mirrors
What is a photograph? is it truth? Is it a lie? Do we take photographs of what we see or do we take photos that reflect what we want to see? Are photographs even responsible for changing what we want to see? When Heiferman (2012) argues that Photography changes everything a paradox is created.
I like the metaphor of Windows and Mirrors, not because it provides answers or I feel more aligned to one than the other, but because it creates questions and demands some genuine consideration of what a photograph is. I have considered a photograph to be something which captures a moment, essentially truth the decisive moment, but I am beginning to think of it as something other.
Returning to the Paradox, if photography changes everything then when a photographer takes an image they must surely be changed by the photograph, if they are changed by the photograph, then does the photographer change everything? If what they capture next is changed by previous images, then they will look at the world in a different way and this will be reflected in the final output, and change them again, the circle then continues. Without answers I still find this so intriguing and thought provoking.
This is exactly what I want from my photography, to be challenged, to think differently and to develop the understanding and skills to produce work which challenge others too. I also want to make a modest living from photography, and to do this I need to develop my confidence in my work, skills and knowledge. I hope the act of learning and practice will help me develop these identified areas to meet that aim.
HEIFMAN, Marvin. 2012. Photography Changes Everything. New York: Aperture.
