Getting Down To Writing...

I'm sure some of my colleagues may be finding this even tougher than I am...its not so much that I cannot write generally.  I've plenty of experience of that.  But most of my writing on art is journalistic, impressionistic, without much specific research...in a word...flip.  Obviously I can draw on quite a lot of background in fine art including photography (although I'm rapidly discovering that I know a lot lot less than I thought I did...) and that helps but sitting down to construct a well researched and well reasoned 3000 word essay is a lot harder than I imagined.  Not that I had thought too hard about this aspect of the course before I started it!

I think I have at least chosen reasonably well - I started with the idea of comparing three photographers but have pared it down to two.  Taking up some of the advice given I've gone with two artists whose work I really enjoy.  The early night desert landscapes of Richard Misrach contrasted with the night beachscapes of Edgar Martins with an objective of understanding both the images and their impulses to construct such images.  I also want to explore how they (at least in my judgment) avoid the cliches associated with night landscapes...examples of which are littered all over nowadays.

So I'm now in avoidance tactics - writing about writing about these two...  maybe I'd better get back to the task...

Cake File

Is this week seven...I think so...anyway this week Dave S created the most delicious chocolate cookies ever...no kidding!  A plate of fantastic cranberry flapjacks and some lovely pear and ginger cakes...top that somebody!  and I'm thinking it will soon be my turn to do the baking...

Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images

Excellent words from the wonderful Italo Calvino seemed right in starting this belated installment of my latest entry.  It's been a difficult week, professionally and domestically - hence the delay in posting anything.  Last week was virtually the mid point of the first semester of this course.  Time to take stock...the inputs have been terrific.  This past week Greg Lucas regaled us with the contents of his "Lost Student box', a collection of discarded negs by students from their college darkrooms over the years.  If they were all genuine (and as a died in the wool cynic I'm still not sure!) then amongst the endless dross there were real gems.  We saw images that somehow defy description or context, you couldn't invent narratives around some of them!  As before Greg wove these pictures into an entertaining and erudite narrative of his own that somehow served to encourage our own exploration of image making on the one hand and frighten the  pants off us clicking a shutter at all on the other...

Week Six and the terrors of taking an image...

Week Six already and more substantive input from Henry Iddon and Andy Greaves.  I think Henry is ex-DMU and Andy is currently in his second year of the MA.  You can check both of them out at their sites as highlighted.  I rated Henry's Spots of Time project pretty highly - I've been doing detailed research into nocturnal images of the land for my first essay (a comparison of Misrach and Martins, more to follow on this) - and he genuinely has done something different with this approach.  I especially love those images where the moonlight casts a really solid light on the land but the distant various light sources reveal the timing of the images and create a really uncanny 'newness' to scenes that might otherwise seem pedestrian and cliched.  His commitment and persistence to getting the pictures is something that is becoming increasingly clear - bodies of strong, thoughtful and novel work don't simply 'happen' but have to be worked at.  Henry said something that Andy also emphasized - start thinking through a final project right now...i.e. six weeks into a two year course!

Cake File...if there was cake it must have been stonking...as I arrived a little late and there was no sign!

Andy showed a strong body of images stretching back over quite a few years - he's been taking serious photographs for ages and also has a very developed practice.  He's tackling 'Englishness' as a subject for his...and already has a fair few images and associated ideas to hand.  It was good to see and hear someone who is still putting together his project as well as those who've done the finished product.

Still one thing that's coming through now is that quite a few of us in the current year  are feeling a little removed from the making of images at the moment - or maybe it's just me?  We have been listening a lot, and now starting to talk a little, about photography.  However that's very much been the focus...and I'm beginning to feel a kind of creeping tyranny around actually taking a picture.  I'm looking at such a lot of work...not all uniformly good, let alone great, but enough of sufficient quality to make me feel pretty inadequate.  It's underlined my initial thoughts that I'm a painter who takes a few snaps...but I guess that's why I'm doing what I'm doing.

Stop making Sense...

The most terrifying thing that I've discovered through my research on the MA is the massive, exponential increase in 'creative' activity that is contemporary photography.  I am sure that other disciplines reveal a similar story though if I take painting as one such I'm fairly sure there is a little less available than the photography medium.  It is rapidly becoming a rather intimidating activity, wanting to get a handleon it all but knowing full well that its an impossibility.  I guess we simply have to retreat inside ourselves and try and make some sense of it from our personal perspective...but its hard to do that when one is - inevitably - being encouraged to be inquisitive.