My MA Studies In Photography

Over and Out

2011-01-27T11:39:00.004Z

This is definitively the last time I shall post to this blog...the MA is now firmly part of the past and in my revised web presence (about to go live) this blog will be part of the archive section. My photography at the moment is being restricted to the role it has always played in my work viz. a supporting part of the creation of paintings and latterly (for the past decade or so) in digital collage. If you are so inclined the archive will give you plenty of stuff to look at!

For now if you are interested my latest blog, established a few months back, preparatory to my forthcoming exhibition at the Tarpey Gallery - opening on 16th July 2011 - can be found @

http://tarpey2011.blogspot.com/

At the End of It All...

2010-12-28T17:42:00.002Z

It's habit forming this blogging lark...though pretty much the whole shebang is over now...I recently wound up the bank account set up to support the show...it still seems as if the group has a life beyond the course. Is this true of all cohorts of students? Somehow I doubt it. Whether we really have staying power is yet to be proven but I am optimistic. The image above I took at the last gathering of the group...

A Few More Images

2010-10-27T12:20:00.002+01:00

from the show... the opening party, the work of David Manley and Kate Luck.

Exhibition Postscript

2010-10-26T10:49:00.003+01:00

Our exhibition went extremely well...both PV's were well attended and the work looked sharp and professional. Everyone had taken care to present enough work without overcrowding the (relatively) small space. The rooms evened out nicely with conventionally framed work mixed with other styles of presentation. All in all an excellent show that attracted good comment. Shown here is (from top to bottom) Ian Fletcher, Adela Miencelova, David Singh and David Atterbury/Daisy Fawcett.

Huzza! the Show opens!

2010-10-06T21:51:00.003+01:00

This coming Sunday @ 2pm our MA show finally opens...it runs for a week at Pedestrian Arts, on Rutland Street in Leicester. It's opposite the LCB Depot (a well known local Managed Art workspace organisation) and just up and around the corner from The Curve (the new Arts Centre) - so in the heart of Leicester's Cultural Quarter. There's another View on Thursday the 15th at 6pm. Everybody is welcome to either of these - and if you can't make either drop in from 9 till 5 weekdays and 11 till 4 on Saturday 17th or 1 till 4 Sunday 18th.

It's been a slog getting it to this point but - hopefully - it will turn out well and attract a deal of attention!

Graduation and beyond

2010-08-20T16:32:00.002+01:00

The reason behind this blog is now well in the past - the course finished back in May - our results were posted in June (I passed with a fair mark) and we graduated in July. I have no intention of posting any of the very twee graduation pictures here. What next - well I have been actively involved in the establishment of a Royal Photographic Society Contemporary Group in the East Midlands and have entered a number of competitions (to date unsuccessfully...) and there is still our graduation exhibition to come. This opens on the 10th October - yes 10/10/10 (though at 2pm rather than 10 am!) at Pedestrian Arts in the centre of Leicester (just around the corner from The Curve and opposite the LCB Depot in what is known as the 'Cultural Quarter'. We hope to be a significant contribution to cultural life in the city over that period!

After a fair gap I have been taking pictures again. At the moment there is no substantive theme at work...other than one or two ongoing obsessions that I have had for some time. One of these is a long term study of the Ligurian Apennines shot from a friend's terrace and inspired by a quote from Lina Waterfield's book Castle In Italy - “a superb view of the Apennines on every side while to the east were the serrated marble mountains of Carrara. There is a local legend that Dante conceived the idea of the circles of Hell and Pergatory while wandering as an exile in the Lunigiana for wheresoever he stood he saw ranges of mountains around him.”

Post Hoc Rations and relations

2010-06-07T16:01:00.004+01:00

So it's well past the event now - indeed we have been marked - are indeed marked men and women now. I have debated whether I should have now left this behind me. There's a strong case for doing so. But the trouble is that one becomes addicted to the steady flow of useless (and even occasionally useful) information that comes through the electronic pipes. For example the last time I read Greg Lucas's blog he was on the lookout for corduroyed gentlemen on old record sleeves. Now for reasons too foolish to recount I have a huge collection of dodgy vinyl. So I rooted through it to see what cheesy geezers I could find...but like Greg I simply couldn't find much (despite imagining that I'd have quite a few). But I did find a few (see above) that I considered he'd find of interest...so imagine my surprise when one of mine turned out to be one of his. Now though there are mitigating circumstances (after all we were on the look out for Corduroy or as it turned out Corduroy sub) but the chances of the same two albums coming out of the cloud given the many many millions in the world - slim I'd say.

Last Rites

2010-05-19T20:33:00.002+01:00

Well…that’s it then! We handed in our work at around two pm today…hung around for a few minutes, said goodbyes to the guys…and headed off to the restaurant for a long lunch.

It will be a little sad not to be gearing up for another session in the months ahead – I have really enjoyed the course and especially the people. I always used to kick off my ‘Dean’s intro’ at Derby by saying to the audience of freshers – turn to the people either side of you and take a good hard look…because they are the people from whom you will learn most, if not nearly everything, over the years of your study. And thus it was with the course at DMU, which is not to undervalue the terrific support, encouragement and insight of the staff team who also gave marvellous value for money.

What exactly I have got out of the course I'm still too close to say. I've learnt a lot...about Photography I now know what I don't know and have a glimpse of what is still there to learn. About life - well - I understand so much more about how tricky and complex it is for all of us and how much tough stuff we all go through and how marvellously resilient and creative some people can be even under real duress and stress. More than anything I feel as if the enormity of just being here is something we all share - or at least those of us who attempt something of this kind...whether we complete (and how meaningless is that when you are undertaking this kind of endeavour) or not.

I have been humbled more times than I care to admit by my lack of knowledge and immensely glad and honoured by the hugely interesting material that my peers and the staff have either achieved and/or created. There has been some terrific stuff and I am richer by far for knowing about a lot of it. The work of artists such as Claude Cahun and Alex Soth and of writers such Michel Tournier and - more than anyone - WG Sebald have all been of value to me. Without the course who knows when I may have come across them?

So I shall be very sad on the 9th June when I shan't be on my way down the M1 to Leicester to meet up with the guys...but I'm still feeling good about knowing them and for having the opportunity to study at DMU. Thank you to you all - and to Paul, Mike & Greg. It's been a fabulously enriching experience.

The Final Part

2010-05-17T17:52:00.002+01:00

Part Three

2010-05-17T17:50:00.001+01:00

Part Two

2010-05-17T17:48:00.001+01:00

The full set and the introductory text

2010-05-17T17:22:00.002+01:00

Well, for better or worse, here's the final full submission of images (In four sets of four as they appear in the portfolio)! Printed both as A2 on Innova Smooth Cotton High White 100% Cotton 315 gsm and as A3 on German Etching 310 gsm - not yet sure which of these two will be submitted this coming Wednesday. Will sleep on it. Just relieved it is all over...as I had already put the essay to print last week. It doesn't seem much now it's all together - but for me it has been a real voyage of discovery and something of a trial too.

The text that accompanies the prints runs as follows:

The lights gleams an instant then it's night once more

Pozzo, Waiting For Godot, Samuel Beckett

Out Of The Woods - A Painter's View explores the subtleties of the natural world through the prism of the artist's body. The landscape is viewed through the artist's X ray of his diaphragm and the mechanics of the body suggest contrasts between inhaling and exhaling, light and dark, between what comes to life and what passes away.

The images capture the fleeting moments of light; that 'sweet light' around the rising and setting of the sun, when the light is warm. They invite the viewer to look a little slower, wait a little longer, and discover subtle nuances of colour, line, form and texture.

The portfolio encourages a reading of the land that is a form of the contemporary sublime and a meditation on the purpose and meaning of our lives measured against the enormity of our natural world.

To experience a thing as beautiful means to experience it wrongly

Friedrich Nietzsche

Final Hurrah

2010-05-12T21:53:00.002+01:00

Well that's more or less it! Today was the final crit - I presented a summary of what I'd got - to deafening silence. It's pretty poor all round, I know that, but I'd have appreciated a bit of feedback even if only negative stuff that I could feed into some minor changes between now and next Wednesday. But I suppose people feel too embarrassed to say anything with outcomes that are so evidently weak. At the weekend I felt like throwing the camera into the Etang but I didn't...I'm still hopeful that - one day - I'll make something half decent. But that day is some years off which doesn't help with a programme that has a deadline of only six days away! What the final submission will be physically I'm still not sure - I'm hedging my bets with several different sets of prints in production including duratrans and large scale images. The one thing I've got out of all this already is the sublime feeling you get when you are alone in the landscape at five in the morning!

Election Day - and completing the text too...

2010-05-06T15:00:00.003+01:00

It's election day in the UK. Rather than take any notice of this depressing spectacle (no likely outcome seems satisfactory to me) I've tidied up my essay and printed it off. My feeling is that it could be better but there has to be a cut off point and I've reached it! Not least as, in the final analysis its the portfolio of images that really matters and I still have work to do there. I am experimenting with a lightbox and transparency as one possible final presentation solution. Having said that I can only present one or two images in that manner if that is the way forward. Another solution is good quality A2 prints - I can only print at A3 and I simply don't feel that the size of these is sufficient for what I feel the pictures convey - but that means farming out the work to others - something I'm rather against. Time is also a factor now...if I am sending them out the 2/3 day turn around has to be factored in. Decisions, decisions... but at least the text is now off my back!

Pushing On Towards The Line

2010-05-03T15:50:00.002+01:00

A long weekend passes and with it another couple sessions to try and get the pictures that will make up the final sequence. Although I have enough images to do so I, like most people I guess, am always trying to get those elusive final few pictures that will make all the difference - in my head at least. But along the way there has to be some playtime so I'm making the occasional composite image that I think might be an altogether different presentation that I'll find some use for after it's all over. This week the first batch of definite inclusions are to be printed - with a second batch on Monday week following one final session...about which more to say next week...

Crunch Time is here!

2010-04-27T08:54:00.002+01:00

Even I am starting to think that it might be decision time. After all the draft essay will have been picked over and analysed by tomorrow evening so there's clearly little time to start completely rethinking that. Strangely that will be the penultimate session for the course (if one discounts the hand in day itself) and it still seems a little unreal that, although the sessions have been fewer this year than last, this activity that has dominated quite a deal of my time for two years is rapidly drawing to a close. More of that in a few weeks when it's over and I can use this to mull over both what it has been and what I have learnt from it.

So yesterday I took some firm decisions. Firstly the submission will be on A3 paper, as I want to print it myself, want to have the flexibility to include pictures up till around a week from hand in (some have suggested this is a little crazy but...) and for both economic and practical handling reasons. However I do think the suggestion that emerged from last week's crit (from Mike S, one of the teaching staff) of light boxes for these images is a really good one. After all even a casual glance at them would be enough for most people to see that the raison d'etre for the work is light and its absence and well constructed lightboxes would enhance the work greatly. So the impulse to firm up the form of the work and to begin initial selection of the pictures that will make up the sequence has been underlined by this decision. Not least because I want an example to submit alongside the paper prints.

Choosing the image to have made up is tough - the very nature of the work is that the differences are accentuated by the similarities - so it's rather a case of Hobson's choice. However the contrasts twixt light and dark is greater in some than others so that has been a consideration. In the end I plumped for the one above.

Where Does The time Go?

2010-04-23T16:44:00.002+01:00

It is really unbelievable that its two weeks since I last posted here...and even more mystifying that the MA is only a few weeks from completion. The current state of play is that there are probably around six images that may make the final cut and there are some five sessions planned to try and cull the remainder - to hopefully produce a sequence of 14 or 15. Earlier this week we had what is almost certainly the last really useful group crit (we have another but too close to the wire to allow for much adjustment, indeed none if you went down the route of book production). Even allowing for changes and adjustments beyond three weeks (and thats where we will be at the end of next week) is risky if one wants commercially produced prints...something that looks likely if I want to have mine printed larger than A3. A good friend suggests I should have everything done and dusted by now...but its just not my style! As for the text....I find that can't really be sown up until the work is pulled together but given the requirements for binding that has to be submitted at least a week ahead of hand in. So all very hairy now!

The End Of Days

2010-04-12T22:30:00.002+01:00

and after all that... pretty much what I'm after...

"The light gleams an instant then it's night once more"

Pozzo,

Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett

The Brick Wall

2010-04-12T08:49:00.002+01:00

It always happens...a crisis of confidence, a feeling that its all pointless, the brick wall! Even though conditions have been intermittently decent and I've been out there taking pictures I feel as if this project has little or no meaning or value. The text is rambling and over complicated and the photos increasingly arch and samey.... I really want to step through into one of those parallel universes where I'm doing something self evidently exciting and vibrant! But sadly that looks unlikely and I'm left with the work I have and how to breathe life into it...ironically now a metaphor that I'm trying to express directly in the pictures...

One small salvation is that, unless I've completely lost my faculties (always a possibility of course), when I look at other bodies of work by artists who relatively recently graduated and have achieved some recognition or success in the same area of activity it doesn't seem that the quality of idea being explored is a deal greater. A small crumb of comfort but nevertheless...

I'm looking at the moment at whether a small amount of judicious compositing might be in order...having already cropped images...all as a result of just looking and shooting rather than having a theory of production that is then simply carried out - there's always a danger this might look like indulgence and that its overdone but if its kept to a sparing application I think it may work.

Test Pieces

2010-04-06T17:17:00.002+01:00

What with the poor light, the wind and rain this is yet to get into proper service. But the shots in the studio are promising...

Onwards Robots!

2010-04-05T12:36:00.002+01:00

There is a certain robotic quality when you are under the cosh of a deadline...I have always rather liked the adrenaline rush when the going gets tough and something just has to come together. On the other hand my temptation is always to be pushing on with ideas for fresh images without fully realising the possibilities of those that came before. I'm a terribly poor completist...and with this project its vital it is a completed piece of work rather than a hotch potch of ideas that never came properly to a conclusion.

Nevertheless I have had to rethink at least a part of the idea to enable the inclusion of the Portrait filter as well as the landscape. Given that all the pictures are landscapes this is a wee bit perverse but I'm following an internal logic of my own and this is where it has led me. Maybe the portrait images ought only to be single pictures - I'd almost definitely decided to pair up the landscape ones but maybe that too needs a rethink. Some decisions are best left to the final hurdle though...

I'm yet to use the portrait filter (that utilises an old x-ray plate taken during my serious illness of nearly four years ago now) in earnest but I'm already excited by what might result from this picture taken a couple mornings ago from the garden window.

Langeuers

2010-04-02T11:33:00.003+01:00

It's not the best of ways forward but for various reasons the last week or two have been pants for progress on the final submission. So April has now become the month where it all has to happen. So awake at 4am this morning hoping to catch the rays as they rose...only they didn't - not until around 11am...so dog tired and a little demoralised. But still I've a list of sunrise times and a set of locations to visit. And of course there's always the text lingering in the background...

In Situ

2010-03-23T18:27:00.002Z

Just when I'm settled I start looking again at those askew images I have started taking alongside the straight ahead pictures... I kind of like the heroic quality of the stick when seen from this angle!

The Confluence of Two Rivers

2010-03-23T16:18:00.002Z

For better or worse the final shape of the project is now coming together. I suppose there may some revisioning as a result of the last crit before Easter (tomorrow) but it's hard to see how, at this stage, a dramatic change is going to take place in the concept or the form of the final work. This piece is, I'm pretty sure, now complete - it's title is "The Confluence of Two Rivers" and it (along with the other four pieces in production at present) means that the idea has travelled a fair distance since starting out last autumn. There will a paired image of Dimminsdale as part of the project but will be simply titled "A small piece of English Woodland" in keeping with the other titles indicating typical landscape types. Behind the images and their titles stands a melange of ideas around landscape photography and more widely landscape as a historical genre in art. This in itself is hardly a new or original idea although accordingly it makes it easier to write about as quite a few other photographers have recently been working the same seam - albeit I trust a little differently than myself. In a way its a calmed moment - I have decided on what it should be and am putting it into effect - the hysteria will return I guess as I wrestle the final selection of 12 to 15 pictures to the ground and try to subdue them...

At the Confluence...

2010-03-23T15:41:00.002Z

of two rivers this morning - the Trent & the Soar - with the Radcliffe Power Station in frame. Funny how the Power Station's around the UK (and Radcliffe in particular) have exercised so many photographers over the years and funny how I've come back to it myself. I'm now using the filtering device - just occasionally - without the filter! Have also taken to placing it off centre and at the margins of the frame - all symptomatic of a growing desire to free myself of the obligation to use the damn thing at all...but as it has been the idea that seems dangerous as well as perverse. However at 6:30 in the morning (having risen at 5) you find yourself easily distracted from your purpose!

Driftin' & Driftin'

2010-03-19T15:56:00.002Z

Sometimes the will just leaves you. Being rather poorly hasn't helped either. But there's a definite whiff of ennui surrounding my endeavours at present. I've got a couple more images that will make it into the sequence for the submission so that at least will make next Wednesday less embarrassing than I expected a day or so back. And who knows there's still the weekend and early next week to go - though Tuesday is being given over to a trip up north - this time to view the Simon Roberts exhibition at the NMM.

Instead I've rather got taken with looking over some of my other pictures, there are others! and I've decided to have a go at a first competition for photographers...risky but fun. Not least as its getting me to print some of my other images up. All this singularly the fault of my friend Simon...whose blog alerted me to the deadline for the RPS print show that he was privileged to have a print in last time around. I very much doubt I'll get anywhere with my efforts but we shall see. My wife, bless her, suggested that one of the images "was the best you've ever shown me"! It's here for other's to judge!

All in the light...

2010-03-12T12:22:00.002Z

At least that's the sage advice I've been given. It has to be generic landscape types now... so moorlands, formal gardens, beaches, and other types will join the woodland and forest to try and capture a set of worthwhile images for the final submission. And it's all in the light - the device needs to be pushed into the unfocussed foreground - so that it has more ambiguity and so that the light - either the early morning or late afternoon light it has to be - is captured inside the device. So I just have to go and do it! Alongside which of course there has to be a text. But given the length of journey, and the distance travelled simply recording the twists and turns will pretty much demolish the word count so its time to buckle up and get on with the final lap!

First Forest Picture

2010-03-08T12:11:00.003Z

Here is the first composite forest picture - it was taken near Darkhill in the Forest of Dean - not far from the site of David Mushet's Foundry at which his experiments with iron founding and the discovery of steel took place. A key issue is whether or not this is at all important or interesting in the context of the work? If it isn't (and to be frank the visual evidence isn't at all compelling!) then the key issue has to be whether I should focus on the generic landscapes as a way forward. A first step needs to be taken so I'm planning rapid trips to locations that can furnish very different visuals including several that I'm fond of and know reasonably well. First up the pool on top of the Roaches in the south west of the Peak...

Back from another woodland

2010-03-07T10:13:00.003Z

A trip to Monmouth was an opportunity to get into the Forest Of Dean. Now that I'm decided on a course of action that will take my filtering apparatus around the UK I immediately hit a fairly obvious problem - viz. one bit of woodland can look much like another - especially when using the kind of device I am. Hopefully when I get to the coast it will all look a lot different.

Another fairly obvious issue is the associative nature of certain kinds of imagery - and because I made it with the very specific purpose I didn't stop to look hard enough and understand how others might view it and the pictures taken with it. A good friend looked at one of the images and immediately thought of a music stand... and of course it is an altogether obvious referent - along with a lectern maybe. And that is interesting to me as if I go back a fair few years (around the early 1990's) I made several works that paired up abstract painted elements with photography and in addition used a lectern as part of the structure (see the photo of the work called "As I walked Out One Summer Morning"). So now I have to do some more thinking through of the whole thing and how and what these aspects say about what I'm trying to figure out with this work.

Moving On...

2010-03-01T18:30:00.003Z

At last some decent late afternoon light! So down to my favourite riverside location to try out the filter stick approach at a different site - hopefully the first of many. Although I'm now thinking of choosing a variety of sites for their significance in terms of their attributes as sites of acculturation this one just about counts if one accepts the disused and dilapidated boathouse that makes an appearance in the lower right hand corner of the image (not that you would necessarily see it!). Anyway it was an opportunity to make some more images and to develop the idea in the camera and afterwards on the screen. This is really vital at this stage - simply to keep on making the pictures, thinking them through visually and assessing the overall impact a selection of times, lighting effects and locations interact to make a picture that has a real resonance.

Too Much Information or a rich rhizome?

2010-02-28T13:15:00.003Z

I have been thinking of alternative locations for the remaining images for my project. At first I thought of using a variety of generic landscapes - but really this seemed too random. There has to be a rationale that stacks up. A conversation on the road with my good friend Simon threw up the possibilities that a number of equally potent sites returning to nature as Dimminsdale provides. In particular in addition to the Forest Of Dean where I shall be later this week, Simon suggested Orford Ness amongst others. Strangely I'm just completing my reading of 'The Rings Of Saturn' by W.G.Sebald and he has just reached Orford himself in the strange rambling journey he has chronicled across Suffolk. It must be an omen.

So I look up Orford Ness in good old google. But as so often it throws up delightfully chaotic linkages that can so easily set me off on other tracks...I sometimes think the net was designed exclusively for me...the 'rhizomatic' deleuzean nature of it suits my magpie mind so well! So I come across Matthew Roberts - an artist I've not previously known but now want to know better! His watercolours of the site (one above) only serve as an intro to the project he undertook in 2008.

New Paintings

2010-02-27T17:13:00.002Z

Three new canvasses that I'm quite pleased with! Nothing to do with my MA work of course...though it's surprising how the thinking about one feeds into the thinking, if not the practice, of the other. In fact there's perhaps more of a connection than I'd want to admit - the interesting element is the way the colour and incident is being pushed out of the picture plane in the paintings and into the centre of the photographs. Why this is I'm not at all sure though I suspect it may have a lot to do with the physicality of paint and canvas as a medium and the choice of digital for the production of the photographs. Even in writing this I'm thinking I may revert, if only as an experiment, to chemistry based photography to try out how it affects the image production for the MA work.

Another Session

2010-02-24T23:40:00.003Z

The sessions now seem to fly by and inevitably we are now looking down the barrel of hard decisions about how and what the shape of the final project submission will look like. Be warned if you come looking here for tips on coping with the course - the time slips away mighty quickly in this last semester. It's harder too to engage in the debates around the work at the group crit - for starters one doesn't want to be too damning as we are hardly in a position to completely reinvent ourselves and our work at this late stage, neither can one suggest new directions that would require fresh investments in substantive reading around the text that - given that a draft has to be submitted immediately after Easter - is rapidly coming upon us. All that said there's still opportunities for interesting diversions and distractions...including the discussion around the revolving dildo's I saw in Venice last summer in the Glass stress exhibition! I thought this video work was amazing...check it out on Hye Rim Lee's website!

Back Home

2010-02-22T17:25:00.003Z

from Stockholm where we mounted a small show of work from Harrington Mill Studios of which I am a member at Supermarket 2010. It was a fantastic experience to be at what has become the premier artist-led organisations art fair in the world. And I had personal cause to celebrate the first ever sale of one of my photographs during the event! And given that it was the only picture that I've produced for my final project that I'm at all happy about it was a double cause for celebration. As well as selling it I had several very good responses from visitors including a very well regarded Swedish photographer who thought it one of the most intriguing images at the Fair (and there were a lot there!).

Overall Supermarket is essentially a networking event and we managed a fair bit on that front with contacts established all over the place. I also sold a painting so came away pretty pleased with the whole thing. Of course taking five days out of the course now means lots of catching up to do but the conversations at the Fair have clarified quite a bit of my thinking so I feel energised to push on with the work. This coming Wednesday we have a group crit so I need to gather together what I have and make some prints for that. Busy times on the stand as can be seen from the photos...there's a refreshingly open and interested audience in Sweden for contemporary work of all kinds.

The Elusive State of Happiness

2010-02-13T11:38:00.002Z

is the title of the truly marvellous retrospective exhibition of the work of Ian Breakwell. Maybe I'm biased - after all I work in Long Eaton (Ian came from there), I was Dean of the Faculty of Art & Design at the University of Derby (Ian studied there as a student, back when it was still, wonderfully, the Derby Art School) and because I had the privilege of knowing him (not well but enough to have seen his acute intelligence and artistic talent at first hand). However it seems to me that Breakwell is one of those rare UK artists who don't fit into any obviously easy 'movement' or category and consequently often get overlooked. He was genuinely a one off...the richness of his output lies in the endlessly mutating exploration of the diary form but it manifests itself in a bewildering and kaleidoscopic variety of media. I was at the opening last evening (at QUAD in Derby) and whilst I wasn't paying the work much attention (I always go to shows I care about at a quiet time when I can engage with them properly) I caught a snippet of an audiovisual piece in which he said "I'm never bored" and that comes across in everything he ever recorded - he simply found the world and everything in it fascinating. One of my favourite works is The Walking Man - go check it out... a truly original 'Breakwellian' take on the idea of the flaneur.

Just Keep Going!

2010-02-11T17:38:00.002Z

We are now very firmly into the home straight - yesterday's session was a tutorial slot and whilst I was given some solid and sage advice there is no doubt that the core message was - you have to decide and you have to find the way to do it. Of course this is absolutely how it should be, indeed when making any art, how it is - eventually no one else can tell you how you feel and how you react to the work you create. Nonetheless in the context of study it still comes hard to you! So now the really hard work is underway - and in many ways a lot of the theory quickly melts away as you start looking hard at what is being made and what will be compelling images. Though there are great ideas out there and even if you are fortunate to gain a toehold on a half decent one they will mean diddly squat if the pictures don't grip the viewer. Obvious perhaps but hard to achieve.

Getting Somewhere?

2010-02-08T10:26:00.002Z

Another grey day it seemed - last Friday - but as the afternoon wore on there was some sunlight...so I hastened over to the woods and got there just as the last rays were disappearing over the top of the site. It was about time I was up on site anyway - the back corner is famed for its snowdrop covering at this time of year and sure enough there they were, just about to fully open up. I thought it was unlikely I'd get much as the direct sunlight had pretty much gone but as it happened that was a bit of a blessing. The diffuse light coming through the trees provided a very different range of images than those I'd achieved the last time I'd set up in the late afternoon with the sun strafing the side of the hill.

I'm trying to trust my judgment as to what 'works' now that I've decided on the formal characteristics I want to work with. These involve placing the filter stick within the picture frame, and thus framing a view within the view that the camera naturally creates. Using a full frame SLR I have options as to whether I use the full frame or crop within it. Most of the earlier pictures did just that - but having pulled back and included the device I rather like the evident backgrounding that surrounds it, creating a tension between that and the 'view' that is visible through the filter (or not depending on whether I focus through it or on it, and how much light is reflecting off the surface of the acetate sheet employed).

Another aspect of making the pictures is of course whether or not to fiddle with the resulting files beyond marginal adjustments of exposure and colour balance. As a painter I have little compunction in this - I'm after an intriguing and evocative image that 'says' something different about the scene than that one would usually expect. In any event photographers have been doing this themselves (something very forcefully pointed out to us by Mark Howarth-Booth when he spoke to us about Camille Silvy) ever since the medium was invented. So I'm definitely up for this and expect to spend a lot of time sat in front of a computer screen weaving images together in dear old Photoshop.

At present I'm holding back on taking the filter stick 'on tour' to other locations despite having made a handsome box stand into which it can be inserted - and thus facilitating shooting on solid terrain as well as softer ground (i.e I've been sticking it into earth to date!). I rather like the notion of taking a wider range of views - urban as well as rural - with the device but a concern has to be whether a meaningful range of 'typical views' (whatever they might be...) can be achieved in the timeframe - and also whether such a radical departure from original intention is a viable option.

The Final Show

2010-02-05T11:18:00.002Z

A great flurry of activity from my peers as regards our final show - which we are reckoning to have sometime in mid autumn and somewhere in the UK! Given it's February already this is likely to become something of an issue if we don't settle on a venue (or venues...) quite soon. The latest in an increasingly long line of locations is back in Leicester itself. I feel this makes some sense as several of us are relatively local with contacts and colleagues who could make up the numbers and for those who have to travel at least they know how to get there! And after all if you live in the South of England then Leicester is as convenient as Birmingham or Sheffield (other locations that we have mulled over). In addition to the Leicester proposal there is some talk of an event in London that (assuming the logistics and economics can be made to work) is a very attractive additional prospect. Of course there is no such thing as a 'perfect' venue and given that I have shown in a bewildering number of contexts in the past, and occasionally in places that I've either never seen at all until I got there (!) or that I've only had photos to work from in advance I guess I'm very relaxed about what a prospective venue might look like. Hopefully we will start resolving some of the issues soon!

Priceless!

2010-02-02T21:15:00.002Z

I was just invited to join a Facebook group that opens with the following quote:

I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories – and how contradictory they are – rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories.
(D. H. Lawrence)

Fabulous, if only for artists currently we should read photographers! Memo to self...stop reading about it and just press the shutter!

Woodlands

2010-02-02T21:07:00.002Z

Maybe one way forward is simply to utilise the device in picturing generic locations... though this has some drawbacks, not least the logistics of getting to the beach, the mountains, etc. in the time available. The first tryouts had better be relatively local...so back to 'Stand 32' to capture the riverside in the manner of the 18th century landscapist obscured by acetate...

Nuthin'

2010-02-01T22:36:00.002Z

in my head at all...at least as far making photographs is concerned. I'm thinking over where I have gotten to with the project that ought to be the bedrock of the final submission in May but it's hard to see a way forward with it that doesn't seem cliched or trite. I am also finding that much of what is written about other photographer's work seems to share a sense of hollowness in terms of what the actual images convey and the theoretical constructs around them. In short many of the pictures are banal and the theorising bullshit!

And yet without a strong theoretical underpinning even the strongest pictures seem to me to lack a real presence. I'm beginning to doubt my own judgment in all this and to question quite rigorously even those photographs and photographers that I've previously admired. Having spent a goodly part of the day rendering in paint several images that could have been almost instantaneously arrived at digitally the pure pleasure of the physicality of the act of painting and the sensuousness that derives from this is what genuinely moves and motivates me most of the time.

However the commitment to the process of better understanding the photographic act is what motivated me to take this course of study and it remains elusive. It's certain that making more images, probably thinking less about how and what they might be, and looking harder at the results is at the very least a prerequisite to understanding better. So over the next few days I shall re-double my efforts to get out and take pictures rather than agonising over what the course of action ought to be.

Results...

2010-01-28T17:04:00.000Z

One aspect of doing an MA that hadn't crossed my mind until now is results. I don't remember ever receiving any back in 1973/4 when I was last undertaking this form of study! In fact apart from a rather fine gold embossed A2 certificate at the end I doubt we were ever given any (ah the days before modularity) marks or anything much at all. Tony would occasionally wander through your (generous by today's standards) studio space and offer an encouraging word or two...usually backed up with a "coming down the pub then".

But now it's all different. A continuous stream of paperwork accompanies every semester and your progress is measured each time. Of course it doesn't matter except that - unless you are very strong willed indeed - you can't help but get caught up in it. It even infects the way in which you engage with the programme if - as it happened this time - you don't know the upshot of the last submission before you have to kick off the next (and of course) final project.

What a desperate ring that phrase has to it! The Final Project. And though the course is structured in such a way that the last project is intended to lead seamlessly into this that's only really ok if what you were working on was - well - working. For me, and I suspect from what they said yesterday, for several others that definitely isn't the case. A great deal of revisionism is going to be required in what is around twelve weeks to make something - anything - that satisfactorily stacks up as a decent submission.

I'm back to the drawing board - with a simple but effective piece of advice ringing in my ears. One thing that has struck me on this programme is that - as a friend of mine once said "average people give average advice" - and conversely exceptional people cut through the crap and give short sharp excellent advice. Fortunately we have had both staff and fellow students who fall into the latter category. For me I got to very pithy pieces of sound good sense if I'm too make something out of what I have done to date. One was to stop over-intellectualising and go with what feels right and the other was to get out of the Woods and get my filter stick into other locations. So that's it really. Of course easier said than done but...maybe the way to move forward.

Collateral

2010-01-19T17:30:00.000Z

One of the joys of undertaking study is meeting a group of interesting people, students and staff, with whom, and from whom, you learn a great deal. Until the course got underway I'd never heard of Michel Tournier, much less read any of his novels. I'm now slowly working my way through part of his canon having had the recommendation that La Goutte d'or (The Golden Droplet) was worth reading with regard to it's approach to the photograph. He is a terrific writer and I'm very pleased to have made his acquaintance. As I am W.G. Sebald, someone whose name I'd heard but of whom I knew nothing. I am currently reading The Rings of Saturn that is one of the most fascinating travelling stories I've ever come across.

Besides these and several other author recommendations my knowledge of photographers (that rather arrogantly I'd assumed {never assume} was rather good) has expanded exponentially. Far too many to record here but for example (and I know some of my female peers will be appalled, though perhaps not surprised) I'd never come across the work of Claude Cahun until she was name checked early on in the course. Shame on me!

Taking A Break...

2010-01-16T12:27:00.000Z

for a few days now that the last submission is in. Reflecting on it I realise that it could and should have been much better than it was. Not least as the very act of putting it together makes you realise more of what it might be. However the good thing about it is that this is but a staging post towards the final project for May. So I have had a couple days off from it and turned my attention back to my painting activity and its associated matters. There's a proposal to put together, a show to organise and prepare for, an event in Sweden (now only six or so weeks away!) and actually getting back to the canvasses on the go in the studio... so plenty to be going on with as well as thinking ahead to the first session of the final semester in a week or so's time.

Phew!

2010-01-13T11:14:00.000Z

At last...I've re-glued the edges of my presentation box, decided on a final 'coda' image and printed and mounted it. Yesterday afternoon I went and got the essay bound. So the interim project is completed. Look at it...it doesn't look much does it! And yet I've laboured hard and long on it, made two Blurb books on the way, am having several images printed up to A2 (to exhibit in Stockholm in a few weeks (though looking out the window now it looks like Stockholm may have come to me..) and feel as if I've just reached the first base camp on Everest. Because it is becoming apparent that one of the key issues with this kind of lengthy and in depth study is simply dogged determination to keep on applying the emotional, creative and intellectual rigour that - just possibly - may result in something worthwhile.

On another tack entirely, though not completely unconnected news reaches me that our Prof - the inestimable Paul Hill - is re-opening the fabled Photographer's Place this coming April. If you don't know of the Place then it's either because you are still fairly young, or have no real knowledge of landscape photography in the UK because just about anybody serious about image making in the great outdoors over the past thirty years either taught, visited or wished to be there at some time. It is great news that Paul is starting it up again, you should check it out.

Procrastination...

2010-01-08T18:14:00.000Z

is, of course, the thief of time...and today, rather than focussing on my text I've been finding plenty of other things to do... including tidying up the hard drive and deleting those images that will never make it out of their pixels. I really wonder how many of the images we all take nowadays will last beyond a few years as the technology moves on and the files get lost...as my friend Simon is doing it is probably wise to turn the best of what one does into paper form - either as books or print archives though this does of course create its own issues in terms of time, costs and commitment. Amongst the images you take you do occasionally get ones that capture a moment - this one is rather ominous I think...shades of air disasters?

Almost There

2010-01-07T15:58:00.000Z

I have mounted all the images, prepared the book and the box into which it is going, and have the title sheet sorted. It's taken from Monday am till now but given that I've had a really bad cold and a hacking cough that has kept me from getting a decent night's sleep since Xmas I'm not too displeased with the results. Whether or not the sequencing is really sorted (or even that I've made the right selection) I'm not so sure but it's that time when you simply have to decide and get it done.

Now it's onto the text...even this is marginally less daunting given that the word count can only be 1500...it's not so much what to say but how to say what you want with such economy. Even my initial notes amount to over 700 words and if I add some reflected text drawn from this blog then I'll quickly run out of road.

For a change here's a different picture one drawn from another project (unrelated to the MA) called Linae.

Onwards Robots

2010-01-04T13:56:00.000Z

is the title of the MA group's account, set up for funding our end of year show...now seeming to be only a few months off as we race through January 2010! It also sums up pretty accurately what I'm now doing with the work. Selecting the 15 final images to make up the project is really taxing - as in truth I still don't have a crystal clear rationale behind them. I am attempting a metaphorical 'journey' through the site, with the images captioned by verbal descriptions using the 'ing' form. But this does of course admit a massive variety of options. Some considerable time ago I settled, fairly obviously!, on 'entering' and 'leaving' as the first and last...though maybe 'reflecting' could follow 'leaving' and there are others too that could come after the act. However choosing the right verb forms for the sequence is hard work especially when the selection of images is still undetermined...it's a slow laborious process of reviewing the pictures one by one, reflecting on the verb forms and their applicability or otherwise to the images, settling on initial conjunctions, printing the photographs and then beginning to position them within the sequence.

As regards the overall form I am, for this part of the project, presenting the selection within a book format where each image is mounted into the chosen sketchbook - itself chosen as a kind of Gazetteer.

Along the way I am also trying to spend a little time working on the text component so that there is, in some part, a natural relationship between the two...it also breaks up the working practice in a way that keeps each activity from becoming a chore! Looking back over the ten or so sessions I've spent on site and the many images taken one can't help finding images that whilst in no way fitting the brief are, nonetheless, ones you want to use in some other way. Here's one such.

A bit 'Blairwitch'?Anyway I very mch

2009-12-30T17:42:00.001Z

I've only ever seen a part of it but my wife says that the current crop of images are a bit 'Blairwitch'. I steer clear of horror flicks myself and 'The Blairwitch Project' with its archly arty handheld handy cam technique was particularly dreary to me so it's not a connection I'm especially keen to foster as regards my project! Anyway I very much doubt I shall 'blog' again in 2009 so if you do happen along here's a picture of a nice half of lager on top the Simplon pass a couple months back...cheers and here's to 2010!

Just Getting On With It

2009-12-29T13:06:00.000Z

Today is rather a good day as far as I'm concerned - I've nothing against the Christmas break but four days of it ought to be enough for anyone. So today, a reasonably 'normal' working day, is better for me now. I'm reviewing my images and deciding on the final form of the submission that has to comprise circa 12-15 'original' photographs. Whilst I still have real doubts about the validity of the work I'm just getting on with it for now - and plotting what I think will be the way forward over the coming months.

What exactly will be made of the pictures that will go into the portfolio (and that too at this point is moot) I cannot imagine - I doubt there will be a great deal of excitement - but maybe it's best just to do it and see. At this point it would, in any case, be rather difficult to justify a complete change of direction and/or subject matter, not least as all my 'academic' endeavour (the reading I've been undertaking) would become superfluous and create a real headache in terms of the text that has to accompany the portfolio.

So the process of selection, post-production and printing begins in earnest over the next couple of days.

Post Christmas Blues

2009-12-27T12:20:00.000Z

It must be something to do with what a dear friend of mine (sadly no longer with us) called 'the festive jollities' but I find myself back at the computer with horrifically deep doubts about the project I am working on. Maybe I just need to push on with it rather than spending too great a time reflecting on the material, then again maybe I need to junk it all and start over. Whatever I do always seems to end up in this quandary - I suspect my perverse inability to see through a body of work, to be so dissatisfied with it that it doesn't achieve completion, accounts for my total failure to create anything worthwhile!

On another tack entirely - isn't wildlife photography really rather hard? I don't think I'd given it a great deal of thought until I met up with Simon but since meeting someone who is very committed to it I have started to give it more attention. Not least as I spend a fair amount of time out in the great outdoors and just occasionally I catch a glimpse of something as it darts from view - a fox the other day and a few weeks back a creature (not sure what) that slipped off the bank and into the brook running through the Dimminsdale site. But I'm never fast enought to get a shot of it. On the other hand sometimes it is really under your nose - like this robin...but I doubt Simon or any other wildlife photographer has anything to fear just yet!!

Woodland Afternoon

2009-12-21T13:01:00.000Z

Another chance to get some good shots yesterday (today too for that matter except I am busy pretty much the whole day). I now probably have enough RAW material to work with (upwards of 1200 shots!) and really need to get down to post production and selection. I'm really pleased with the newer 'abstract' material...so most of the final submission of 12 to 15 prints will come from the later material...and maybe, if we keep getting light like this, from shoots yet to happen over the festive period. As my friend Simon says, a good time to work in these outdoor locations whilst others are tucked up indoors!

Reflections

2009-12-17T16:11:00.000Z

On the crit yesterday. It was encouraging to see that there was a fair bit of work floating around and the atmosphere had picked up a little. A sense of gritty determination to pull something worthwhile out of the bag was evident and some of the results were quite startling. I showed a number of contact sheets with a wide variety of pictures on them from half a dozen sessions on site and quite a lot of post production work. Inevitably the more recent efforts seemed to attract the most interest and they are the most 'abstract' of the work to date. I'm mildly resistant to this - I started out wanting to engage the medium in a 'purer' form but on one level it makes sense to use what I know so I'm putting aside my initial thinking and trying to work with, rather than against, the grain.

Anyone Out There?

2009-12-16T11:49:00.000Z

I occasionally wonder...however as it's getting on towards Christmas...I'm posting the ecard here that I'm sending out to one and all. Professor Paul Hill, our Course leader reckons it was taken in Alsop en le Dale and if anyone should know he should. I don't think anyone can have tramped the Peak around there more than Paul. Off in a moment to the last crit before Xmas and, more significantly in terms of this blog, the hand in point for the first semester of this second year.

I think, I hope, that I am making some progress towards something coherent in terms of a submission. I'm pretty settled on format and draft contents - I even have chosen at least three of the images for inclusion. Beyond that I simply need to focus, visually and conceptually, to ensure I can present something both visually intriguing and intellectually clear. Simple! or not...

If in doubt prevaricate...

2009-12-09T17:00:00.000Z

I'm struggling to put together a coherent text to accompany the pictures I have been making since September (well actually before that even...) so today I have been prevaricating. At least it was sort of to a purpose...a mail arrived requesting 'hard copy' for next week's final crit of 2009...so that is what I have been doing. However at our last session it was recommended that I produce some contact sheets so that is what I have done.

And glory be it's been something of a revelation! Normally I select down to individual pictures and print them off, I guess I'm something of a secretive bugger really (years of working alone in the studio), but this is helpful and shows a little more of the process going on. In fact it shows a real sense of the development of the idea and maybe, just maybe, will feed into the commentary in a very positive manner. So now I have no excuses left and will reluctantly leave this forum and address the blank screen that is currently the commentary... Here's one of the 'try out' images...a long exposure at twilight...that looks way too much like so many other current photographer's so thats a direction ruled out!

Start Making Sense

2009-12-03T12:12:00.000Z

Is it good or bad that everyone seemed just a tad in the doldrums at yesterday's session? I guess that this point in the semester, the calendar year and the season it might be expected. It certainly isn't a particularly enervating time to be shooting in the great outdoors - which is precisely what a number of us are doing. Even the guest speaker - our first of this year - the inestimable Brian Griffin, who usually does a pretty lively, rather funny and scatological gig seemed to have taken a rather wistful turn of mind for the occasion (I think it might have been the 'academic' context!).

It's also getting to that time when you really do have to decide what you are trying to do with the work for the first hand in time only a few days into 2010. And I guess that is weighing on all our minds. Reflecting on it afterwards I feel it's a measure of the quality within the cohort that there is such a strong sense of want amongst us in terms of saying something distinctive, if not (whisper it), original, that is keeping us from resolution. A long winded way of saying we are not easily pleased. Given the number of young students I've seen over the years who seem very happy to run with their first, slightest idea this is actually pretty healthy!

So; time to knuckle down and get stuck into some serious thinking, action and revisionism...

Out And About

2009-11-30T19:48:00.000Z

Following on from a trip to Saltaire, to see the Hockney material there, I spent a couple days hosting an old friend on a visit to our home at the weekend. It was good to take a few steps back from the immediacy of taking and processing images from the woods. Although that said, the Hockney material gave an opportunity to think about my subject matter from a much more direct visual perspective that will be helpful as I move forward with the final construction of the 12 to 15 images that the course demands of us for January. It is frightening how swiftly the time slips away in this second year of the programme - if anyone who comes after me and wants to take any pointers ever reads this - be very aware that you need to hit the ground running in the September if you are to progress effectively!

Today I took more time away from the development of the project and as I drove north up the Derwent Valley I reflected ruefully that it seems at present that every time I do so the light that day seems especially beneficial. Today was no exception and the clarity of light as I drove towards the Peak was truly marvellous, but no matter I was off to the East Midlands Arts in Rural Areas Network Conference at the Level Centre in Rowsley. Given my current interests in terms of my photographic practice this seemed very much like the kind of event I ought to be at. In the event several presentations did give me good opportunities to both reflect on the work I am doing and to network with others who might either be interested in collaborations and/or exploitation of the outcomes. Two speakers in particular - John Newling and John Fox, although coming at the issues from very different perspectives (and utilising quite polarised means) both touched upon the pivotal big questions that face us all now and that - albeit in a way that is different again from either of them - I hope my project can similarly address in its final conception. So a day that very much was not at all wasted albeit that the light suggested I be elsewhere!

On another tack I am increasingly drawn towards utilising video as a component in the body of work that will eventually result - in part this is a reflection of the viewing of several video works that were on display at the Venice Biennale earlier this year and also those that the artist David Claerbout showed in London this past summer (and that I have written about here before). Some ideas simply beg to be subjected to the temporal - something a couple of my colleagues have been playing with (using Powerpoint and Animation) - and this snippet from a piece by the Australian artist Shaun Gladwell ties together aspects of my own current concerns and those expressed at the EMARAN event earlier today...

Trying It Out

2009-11-25T18:57:00.000Z

I've been over to the wood earlier this week to try out my filter stick. It's a handsome object if I say so myself - fashioned from the finest offcuts lying around the house and lovingly 'clarted' together with cheap screws and a few tacks topped up with lashings of some old sadolin I found in the garage! At the moment I'm using some cheap acetate that was accidently flashed through a photocopier back in the nineties as the inserts - it gives a curious flared quality to the images that have resulted. I wanted a device that would in a manner distance the viewer from the images and make them less overly indexical. Marrying this to the strong compositional thrust that I am now being far less coy about using I'm thinking they ain't turned out too bad... So I'm printing up several of the cropped results - I'm booking a tutorial for next week to see how the tutors feel about these pictures and I'm putting one up here too.

Trying Out

2009-11-19T09:01:00.000Z

It sometimes occurs to me that the only way of resolving work is trying out ideas and permutations for real. I know that many creative people rehearse their concepts over and over in their heads before committing them to paper, canvas or whatever - and that some of them have the clarity of vision to enable them to pull off a success in a seemingly effortless way. American artists often convey a little of this approach though whether it's genuinely the case or not who knows? I was reminded of this earlier this week when the eminent photo historian Mark Haworth-Booth gave a lecture at Uni (for the new MA in Photographic History) that by agreement those of us on the Photo course were also invited to attend. His excellent presentation was focussed on the relatively little regarded French photographer Camille Silvy. Part of his talk made mention of taking the American photographer Stephen Shore to a spot where Silvy's most famous picture was taken and that MHB was surprised at how quickly Shore made his image. It seems to confirm my suspicion - I imagined a contemporary English photographer, say Jem Southam, taking the same shot. Though to counter my thesis think of Thomas Joshua Cooper doing the same thing...

However at our most recent session for our course we had a workcheck afternoon and this relaxed and informal opportunity to share work in progress initially prompted me to try out several 'idea' containers for selections of pictures made at my chosen location. Besides some reasonably decent images from the late spring in 2005, until this summer I had not taken any serious photos of Dimminsdale but since early June I have amassed over 1000 images. Quite a few are unusable for a variety of reasons but even so there are perhaps now 200 to 300 pretty solid pictures to work with - and over the next 6 or 7 weeks more will be taken. From what is currently to hand I had tried out three thematic containers - and produced A3 prints to exemplify these. The review threw up some strong responses. In particular a brief but illuminating discussion with the Course leader made me realise, fleetingly at the time, but resonating with me over the hours that have followed, that I have to draw on my background and experience as a painter. That might seem obvious to others but I have, until now, unconsciously been denying myself this - indeed looking back now I feel that I have actually been avoiding the conventions of my practice, particularly as regards form and colour, in favour of a fiercely indexical, formalist approach to photographic recording. Where I have toyed with the use of other media interventions these have more often been allied to the photograph rather than more straightforwardly incorporating them into the photograph.

Coming back from the session and thinking ahead I now realise more clearly what I need to do now to progress the initial investigation. Firstly taken the best of the images selected to date, secondly revisit the totality of what I have and select those images where my innate and learned painterly vision did intrude on the choices I made when shooting (paradoxically probably those moments when I stopped thinking about making a photograph and reverted to simply looking and shooting) and finally reshaping and cropping images that reinforce my perspectives on the subject to strengthen the selection.

I am also resolved to hold back on the use of my filtering device until after the first semester submission - maybe it will come into play in the final push towards the major project alongside the cast objects - but for now I want to try and discipline myself in using only the direct photographic record, albeit filtered through my own vision as described, and perhaps with the briefest addition of text. This last element also resolved in discussion at the session. I had tried out a notion of an 'Annunciation' and also one of 'the Humours' both I suspect as a way of trying to reference back to historical impulses? I'm not clear what - and that was bluntly pointed out! So I am returning to my initial notion of a journey, utilising verb titles (Entering, Wandering, Leaving) but underpinned by two other temporal 'journeys' through the day and the seasons. Taken together - the reassertion of my formal painterly understandings of the picture making and the notion of these journeys - I hope to be able to assemble the resolution of the project brief for this current negotiated study over the coming few weeks.

The picture here is the one that I produced as 'Sanguine' from The Humours - and that seemed to be the more popular of those that I had printed up for the crit.

Planning Ahead

2009-11-16T21:33:00.000Z

One aspect of the work for the next semester is already being put in place. I want to experiment with real and manufactured objects in the landscape. So I have arranged for two tree branches I found on site to be cast in bronze. In part this is a reaction to the history of the place...one of the first sites of the industrial revolution it is likely that, in it's heyday, Dimminsdale would have seen metal casting, not least as material for the processes was being quarried onsite. On another tack I am very interested in how we perceive the objects that are represented by the photographic especially in the digital age. A further resonance is created by the use of cast metal objects - that harks back to the arte povera movement of the late sixties/seventies and particularly the work of the artist Guiseppe Penone - who has a really important place in my interests and understanding of the landscape idea.

The work is being done at a location called Burnt Stump...that seemed to be a good omen for the casting of branches of trees! And strangely it shares a site with The Park Hospital - where my heart operation took place, and which led fairly directly to me being in a position to take up the MA in the first place - surely some serendipity here!

Formations and Production

2009-11-14T13:08:00.000Z

As I progress my current project, sending off a second selection of images to create another book (I am making these as a means of having actual pictures to look at and help me select from) I am musing on the proliferation of material out there. For example I checked out the tag 'Dimminsdale' on Flickr and found some seventy images - and amongst them some fairly accomplished ones at that. Not that it matters nor that in itself it is a bad thing that we nowadays have so much access to so much material but it does make think hard about how one presents work to signpost people to it and to put your ideas and feelings embodied in the work to the fore in a crowded world of pictures.

Perhaps because of my background in Fine Art practice the physicality of the work is vitally important to me and the manner and means by which the finally selected images are presented is crucial. So I am already giving thought to this...both as regards what is handed in for assessment and - and more problematically - what will be exhibited in the final exhibition. For the assessment I am pretty certain that I will print myself...on A3 Hanhemulhe German Etching Paper and present the portfolio in an archive box. I did want to commission someone locally to do this but I am coming up short on anyone who can do this sort of work - so I am seriously considering the 'rolls royce' of conservation boxes for museums - the Solander by G. Ryder as being the closest I'll get to what I had envisaged.

Selecting down the images and deciding exactly the context in which they will be presented is still very much at the experimental stage - though I am narrowing down the range of ideas and adopting a clearer approach to the process as I go. Two important elements of my ideas formation are being put in place right now. Firstly I've joined and made contact with the Leics & Rutland Wildlife Trust to begin to strengthen my understanding of the history and geography of the site and secondly I am off to the marvellously named Burnt Stump on Monday coming to arrange the casting of my chosen 'Golden Bough' that I am fairly certain is going to feature in the project as it develops next semester (the first potential 'model' for it is pictured here!). I have also completed my 'filter stick' - a device that I have probably laboured over for far too long but that also is likely to play a significant role in the final project...

Back to Business

2009-11-12T16:18:00.000Z

What with the trip to Italy and yesterday a very enjoyable day out in London it has taken me until now to get back to the business at hand - the current MA project. 'In The Demon's Wood' is a detailed and in-depth study of a small piece of managed woodland straddling the Leics/Derbys border at one end of the Staunton Harold reservoir. The site is known as 'Dimminsdale Wood' and this is believed to be a possible corruption of 'Demon's Wood' - hence the title. Its a site I have visited three or four times over the years and now I'm regularly up there with the camera. Taking this site as the locus for my major project fits well with some early advice we were given last year by photographer (and previous graduate) Nick Lockett - to take a subject that was both accessible and familiar. The fact that I have already over five hundred shots of the woods from as far back as 2003 and across the spring and summer months is most helpful though the recent shoots over the early autumn and those to come through the winter ahead and as we move into springtime again will be the core of the work.

This is a rich site that exemplifies one of my key objectives with this work, that is drawing heavily on the core thesis contained within Simon Schama's book Landscape & Memory. He puts it clearly and concisely himself - "a way of looking: of discovering what we already have, but which somehow eludes our recognition and appreciation." Like Schama I am not seeking to offer solutions to the dilemma of "wanting both to repair environmental abuse and to preserve liberty" but simply pointing to the ways in which nature often defeats and reclaims territory merely by being. How the photographic recording of the site will achieve this I have yet to figure out in any detail. Initially I am trying to stay true to a straightforward recording of what one can see as one walks the trail. Later I hope and expect to use a variety of strategies, metaphors and interactions (always of a non-intrusive nature) to try to prise deeper meaning out of the work. To help me literally visualise the work as it progresses I have initiated a series of books (shooting digitally this provides a relatively inexpensive way forward, although I have some doubts about the quality of the object) and started to create a new website where images can be viewed - once this is up and running I'll post a link to it from here.

As always it is difficult containing the flood of initial thoughts and ideas around a project and shaping them into the necessary constraints of the academic process but somehow that has to be done. As before I'm hoping that this record will help me achieve this.

AwayDays

2009-11-06T16:20:00.000Z

I've tried to avoid missing sessions on the course but this past week I simply couldn't get back from Italy soon enough to be there. This is not at all good, not least as I missed out on feedback on my proposal, and the first tutorial on the progress with the project to date. The fact that sessions are fortnightly this year means a whole month elapses before the chance to catch up with everyone. Nonetheless the trip abroad was an opportunity to get some winter sun and to reflect on the ideas I am trying to work with. A first book of images arrived just as I left to go away and at the least provided some early indicators as to where it might go over the coming weeks.

Meanwhile the trip to the south provided another opportunity to check out some research provided by my good friend Simon. With a small b&w image to work with he had pinpointed a spot in the Rhone valley that was a potential site for a photo taken in the late 1950's - no mean feat when you look at the picture. I was amazed, as was my travelling companion, that he had very nearly got it right down to the exact spot! Although this was a scouting mission for a more comprehensive later outing I can't resist an early 'cheap shot' comparison if only to show how exact the location details were.

Outta Here!

2009-10-26T21:13:00.000Z

I haven;t managed to blog since the second session of this semester last Wednesday and now I'm off (in about 6 hours) to Italy until Friday week. The trip should be eventful - in part trying to recreate a journey made by my father-in-law in the fifties - and otherwise taking a variety of items and materials to a friend's house in Northern Tuscany. The trip involved a car and trailer with a BRM racing car on board going from the Midlands to Monza (outside Milan) - a trip that was quite a hike back then. I have only 13 b&w photos to go on, some are relatively easy to spot (the top of the Simplon pass for example) others are tougher. One my friend Simon has done some excellent detective work on and I'm hoping to prove him correct in his deductions. The illustration here is on route over the Simplon pass---will I find the exact spot? Uummm.!

Meanwhile my first photo book documenting my work in the woods has arrived - another is in production asap I return from Italy. More images need processing and my project proposal is with the academic staff - so, all in all, that seems reasonably on course. Whilst in Italy I shall be seeking out a suitable piece of woodland for comparative purposes!

Intentionality

2009-10-19T17:55:00.000+01:00

As I sift through the pictures I have taken over the past few sessions in the wood I find myself dwelling on the issue of intentionality. I want to find ways of creating a veil or barrier between the viewer and the image as a device within the pictures to 'distance' them from a direct reading of the pictured. Of course there are many ways of doing this and I want to explore both analogue and digital. I have tried experimenting in subtle ways with the tools in Photoshop and to an extent these do 'work' with the final images. I'm developing a repertoire of devices that will create actual barriers between the lens and the subject - and it will be interesting to see how these work out. But one of the simplest ways of doing so is to simply choose 'bad' (at least technically so) pictures from amongst all those that one shoots in a session. For me that usually means at the very least a couple hundred from which there are always around 10 to 15 percent that have technical 'issues'. Most of these are hopeless but just occasionally there's one that stands out for some reason (little understood but more a gut reaction) and demands my attention (the one here is just such a picture). My problem is that there was no intentionality in my taking that image - I chose it, and maybe thats enough? - but I didn't set out to make it and that is uneasy for me.

Getting Stuck In

2009-10-15T11:42:00.000+01:00

The good thing about a project in which you are genuinely excited is that once started it takes over everything. 'In The Demon's Wood' is now an obsessive idea - taking pictures in all kinds of conditions, reviewing and post production work, ideas for ways in which I can bring out the richness of the environment, learning more about the place and much more besides. I am hopeful it will start feeding into my painting practice far more directly too so that the work in the studio can become a part of the whole process. I must take a few moments to write up the processes into the 'project proposal' for the course so that it can be unpicked as I go but to be honest that's one of the less exciting parts of the project - important nonetheless!

Here I've put two of the earliest experiments with the images taken to date. I'm planning to show them (or more worked up versions) side by side as Enterin' & Leavin' the Demon's Wood when we take a selection of current work from our studios in Long Eaton to the Supermarket Art Fair in Stockholm next February. What I want to do is start to create a kind of narrative journey across and into the site, not only as a physical activity but a psychological, historical and scientific enterprise with metaphorical and occasionally surreal overtones! Some ambition but its always good to overreach a little...

Back to Business?

2009-10-14T12:41:00.000+01:00

Last Wednesday was the first session of the new Academic Year. Half way through the MA and sensibly enough time to take stock. Higher Education places a deal of importance on evaluation and reflection so that was much of the task. Like many others I found this a difficult business given the distance between the production of the main project and now. It seems a long time ago it was springtime! Maybe we didn't get the balance quite right as the first tentative steps towards our focus for the year ahead - the negotiated study that will be the springboard for the major project after Christmas - came rather late in the afternoon when energy levels start to flag.

Never mind, though given that sessions will be fewer and farther apart - this week its Wednesday again and it feels strange not to be headed towards Leicester - to have kicked off with a little more pizass would have been good. Yesterday I was up early and out to the site that I have suggested I will choose for the project. In the round room discussion of what we were planning I gave out a location, a broad sense of the 'idea' and, more for fun than with any degree of seriousness, a 'methodology' - one provided by Italo Calvino's excellent Mr. Palomar (a great source of wisdom). My focus is on a small site of Special Scientific Interest that straddles the border of Leicestershire & Derbyshire, nr. Staunton Harold reservoir called Dimminsdale Wood. So that was where I was at 7am yesterday (damn early for me though I know other photographers, well one anyway! who would call that late in the day...) and I started shooting. This time out I'm shooting first and asking myself the questions later - its self directed study after all!

Motivation

2009-10-05T11:48:00.000+01:00

can be very difficult sometimes! I'm still prevaricating over the project proposal for the second year - with the first session looming in a couple days... Nothing I seem to think of has sufficient resonance for me and this is coupled with a rather depressed state of mind regarding the value of just about all the activity I'm currently engaged in. Not a good combination.

I find myself looking at a lot of current landscape photography with a rather flat feeling of 'so what' - though its quite tough and costly I still have a feeling that simply going to a distant photogenic location (the Artic for example) with an 8x10 plate camera and taking an image really isn't either so difficult or onerous as it once might have been, nor is it in these technologically advanced times that sumptuous to look at. In short the absence of a transformative element to my mind straightforwardly doesn't elevate the activity to the status of art.

By the same token where a transformative act has been applied the results can seem very pretentious - and a good deal of recent art practice falls into that trap. Maybe there is somewhere in between that can create something with genuine meaning and resonance but I'm not seeing it! How (and whether) I can build this into a worthwhile proposal is yet to be seen. I seem to be staring at a blank wall rather like this one I photographed in Portugal a few years back...

Out and about - Competitions

2009-10-03T13:48:00.000+01:00

I have been very hit and miss at entering competitions over the years - usually missing the deadlines despite best intentions. However as I now have less professional commitments elsewhere I'm making a better effort. First up this autumn is the Derby Open and this painting from last autumn - Secret Garden, Oil on Canvas 48x48 inches - made it into the show. I entered three works but given their size doubted they would all make the cut - and also given that they were very experimental, out of the 'normal' run of my work - more explicit imagery, more paint handling, I was interested to see whether they would be accepted at all. So to have ne on the walls is pleasing. I am still hesitent about entering any of the photographic work - 'straight' or manipulated but I maybe will put something of this kind forward to either Leicester or Nottingham (both coming up shortly).

Head above the Parapet

2009-10-02T11:17:00.000+01:00

I raised the issue of a final exhibition of the MA cohort earlier in the year and set numerous hares running! You wouldn't believe the acrimony than results from an innocent enquiry. I imagine that the exhibition issue is more important to those who have never done it before than those of us who have been involved in (as well as wholly responsible for) shows since the mid 1960's! Nonethless as 'responsible' adults we ought to be able to sort out one small modest MA event easily enough. So risking the wrath of all I have put my head above the parapet once more with a draft proposal that if accepted has the benefit of both securing a decent venue at a time of our choosing and allowing a decent interval for securing the necessary funds to put the thing on with a degree (excuse the pun) of professionalism. I guess we'll see - last time the mere mention of the idea caused an avalanche of email traffic...

Over the summer there was so much of interest going on this blog couldn't possibly keep up with it. One thing that sticks in my mind was the Derby Feste - a three day extravaganza of entertainment. On the Saturday a French performance group entranced everyone with their drumming and their elevation into the air above the Market Square - the photos here hardly does it justice (it really was a case of 'you had to be there') - raised up like a Calder mobile over the top of the Clock Tower, the QUAD and the Assembly Rooms. Magnifique!

Coming Up For Air!

2009-09-27T14:05:00.000+01:00

What with one thing and another (a trip to Venice, Sarah's stint on 'the fourth plinth' and my coffee morning in case of Macmillan Cancer Support) it's been a fair while since I last posted anything here. I do wonder what the purpose is...after all at best a handful of people view it...all of whom I could easily have a decent conversation with! Nonetheless I shall try and rachet up the postings as I move into the second year of the MA. We have been given our initial materials for the upcoming semester that include the pro forma of the 'learning contract' which we should have completed in draft form by Wednesday week (our first session of AY 09/10). A daunting prospect - even for someone like myself who started drafting these things around 15 years ago when a colleague and myself established an MA by project and felt we ought to have a means of benchmarking the student's progress over a major project against some sensibly articulated document setting out what they intended to do.

Of course now the boot is on the other foot and I am the student I'm bristling at the impudence of lecturers trying to tie down my unfettered creativity in advance of making the work! Still it's a good discipline to have and exactly why I signed up to the programme - though I am determined to keep the document hazy and provisional for as long as I can get away with it!

Over the past few weeks I have been mulling over the final project and now I have to write up a draft it seems so...banal...methinks. But whenever I try to think of something more exciting, dynamic or - goodness - original I simply blank out.

Anyway more of that later - for now here's an image of my 'Andy Warhol says give peace a chance' - made in 1972 to accompany a 'sound piece' and performance - and resurrected for my Macmillan Coffee Morning event!

Ostrale 09

2009-08-27T12:49:00.000+01:00

Have had some time to reflect on participation in the 'Ostrale 09' in Dresden and also on some of the other work featured in the show. For example the photography (of which there was a fair bit) was a mixture of what might be expected in a German dominated exhibition and work that very definitely isn't at all related to the 'Dusseldorf' school. I am posting a few examples but as I can never work out how they get ordered on the blog you may have to work out what's what for yourself!

I guess Goran Gnaudschun's portraits might have been what was expected - their frontality, naturalism and formality is evident but they also had a wistfulness to them. Ingo Wilhelm's black and white portraits shot from outside the windows of public transport were especially moving. Sven Alexander Heine had experimented with photo emulsion on concrete but I felt the images themselves were insufficiently strong to carry the metaphorical weight of the form. I very much liked Astrid Korntheuer's inkjet prints of forest and fields - but then it's not surprising as they were in territory similar to that I want to work!

Back to some kind of normality...

2009-08-27T12:24:00.000+01:00

It's been a hectic few weeks that culminated in my wife's exhibition opening at the City Gallery in Leicester earlier in the week. I'm now off to my studio on what is pretty much the first quiet, uninterrupted day for nearly a month! I have quite a lot of catching up to do on a number of fronts...the painting activity is underway and quite a few canvasses require resolution before I start in seriously on some new work loosely based around an imagined garden that will be mainly conducted on a large scale. On the photography front I want to experiment further with the ideas I am kicking around for my major project for the second year of the Masters and that will mean more visits to site and more research of a detailed kind into the relevant flora in the area under consideration. I'm planning to merge several images into one another, with the scale of the various natural matter oscillating wildly on the picture surface and then print them a larger scale. A first effort - purely for initial interest - is posted here.

Back Home

2009-08-21T09:44:00.000+01:00

from travels across Germany - its a big country when you travel from the western border with Luxembourg to the eastern boarder with the Czech republic! Still we visited both Weimar and Dresden that (apart from Berlin) are my first forays into the old east. Both of them in their own way very beautiful cities. The show in Dresden was fascinating - a mix of ultra professional and student shindig - and all taking place in the old slaughterhouse buildings (as immortalised by Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse 5). My work got a small room in the Direktoren Villa to itself and I was pleased with it! See the photo...the rooms had been left pretty much as they were creating an interesting tension between the marks on the canvas, deliberated but seemingly random and those on the 'distressed' walls, random but now seemingly deliberate! I'd taken a last minute decision (chicken maybe?) to show paintings rather than photos and/or manipulated digital works but in the context (of over 130 artists exhibiting) where there was a predominance of such work I was glad I had. In fact I am increasingly worried that the photography 'experiment' is proving to be a bridge too far for me in terms of my passion for the handmade. But maybe I can (as my friend Simon hinted at recently) bring the two closer together over the coming months?

Showing Now!

2009-07-31T16:11:00.000+01:00

Over the past few weeks I've been taking a break and thinking about what next. Along the way stuff comes up - so 'for one week only' actually only until next Thursday...6th August - I'm showing with a number of other artists in an enterprising exhibition set up by Alyn Mulholland at the Angel Row Gallery in Nottingham. The three collages from the "Le Pays Minervois" series look good on a proper gallery wall and suggest to me that I may have to reconsider my final project - maybe bringing some of the fine art practice into the photographic side. I also feel that this may enable me to bring into the work some of my thinking around the uses to which we put the natural world and our depictions of it.

Out And about - The Craic

2009-07-19T13:44:00.000+01:00

Dublin is as always bright and blustery, even in summer. I'm a great fan of Jack Butler Yeats and the sky above the city reminds me of his paintings greatly. Its a few days of immersion in contemporary (or recentish) painting with visits to the Hugh Lane Gallery and IMMA. The Hugh Lane is now surely one of the most handsome galleries just about anywhere...with the added bonus of the re-creation of Francis Bacon's studio and now the Sean Scully room (see picture). Alongside its selection of leading Irish artists and other bits and bobs (this time a delightful room of mixed landscapes across three centuries plus a striking show of four leading mid career painters) the place is a fabulous triumph of recent painting. The Yinka Shonibere work that dominated the foyer space was also a really magnificent tour de force.

At IMMA the main attraction is a ten year retrospective of the paintings of American artist Terry Winters (see picture). Winters is a bit hit and miss to be truthful - his obsessive interest in form and the endless variations around those he chooses make his drawings a real feast but the paintings sometimes suggest a less than thoroughly convincing engagement with colour and a cack handed roughness (not that in itself this is a bad thing) that occasionally overwhelms the image. At least thats my view - what cannot be gainsaid is his industry - the work on show being but a part of his output over the period.

Travel agent

2009-07-09T16:52:00.000+01:00

I have pretty much spent my day arranging travel. My wife and I are off to Dublin next week. The painter Terry Winters has a big retrospective taking place at IMMA and besides she hasn't seen the recreation of Francis Bacon's studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery. As a long time admirer of his it will be a treat. On top of that we are off to Dresden in August to view our own work in a big art jamboree titled 'Ostrale 09' - a rare opportunity to be seen in the context of a wide ranging survey of international work. Getting to Dresden reasonably cheaply and comfortably not that easy! In addition we are off to Venice in September and then in Italy again in October. All good fun but quite a bit of organisation.

I'm also tidying up my departure from University life having decided to resign from my post at Derby - dangerously scary stuff but right for me now. In part it will help me focus in on the MA, create space for my wider practice and - hopefully - allow for new projects and ideas to emerge. One of my recent series of artworks - 'Le Pays Minervois' a set of digital collages needs more work on as it looks possible they may feature in a research journal this winter...hopefully other similarly interesting possibilities will come up as I move forward.

Through the summer months

2009-07-07T15:50:00.000+01:00

It's proving difficult to find the need to post...not helped either by a stinking cold that laid me low for a week or so. Although it's been a busy period - sorting out work to go off to a major show in Dresden in a few weeks time alongside submissions to competitions and so forth - the real reason for not posting is that I haven't either been taking pictures or really giving much thought to the taking of pictures.

I have made a couple more trips into Dimminsdale Woods where its looking likely I'll set my major project but I'm trying to keep an open mind on the subject for the moment - and finding it pretty easy to do so!

I'm venturing into the competitions simply to get myself used to the idea of submitting my photographs for consideration - not because of any illusions as to their worth. The landscapes are proving tough to find something new to say.

Weddings and Sunsets

2009-06-21T09:49:00.000+01:00

There was a good deal of critical commentary towards the millennium around the idea of 'beauty' spurred on, in part, by the crisis in confidence in the then rapidly diminishing returns from the YBA and subsequent generations mining the legacies of Marcel Duchamp. Quite how the discussions, often centred around the margins of post structuralist philosophy (and particularly focussed on post feminist texts, entirely misappropriated), turned out I am not at all sure. Part of this is down to my dwindling interest in keeping up with the current chatter in the art mags and part - I suspect - to a confusion about exactly what contemporary art activity can be as we dig into the century for real.

The place of photography in all this is even more vexing - I have written before about the barely contained horror of one or two of my fellow students as regards sunsets! - where the cliche is hard to avoid if one moves into certain subject areas. But why can't we consider weddings or sunsets as suitable subjects for 'art photography'? Are they simply to be excluded because of their ubiquity and staus as 'known' material - after all Avedon, for just one example, mined the frontal, b&w, portrait to the point of exhaustion - Tom Cooper and Sugimoto the oceans and so on and on.

These thoughts occurred to me as I shot endless frames from a friend's terrace recently and cropped up again when I took snaps at her son's wedding - along with everyone else naturally. At least its a change of pace and problematics from the MA for a few weeks! In The Inhuman by Jean-Francois Lyotard there's a quote that resonates with me - "The pleasure procured by the beautiful is not the object of research, it happens or it doesn't".

Calming Down A Tad

2009-06-08T19:34:00.001+01:00

Following on from the semester just passed I began, last week, to start agonizing over the 'major' project for the year ahead, I bored my friend Simon with my crazy ramblings about whether it should be this or that whilst we were 'taking the air' and started to get quite het up about it.

Over the last day or so I have tried to calm down a little and take a step back. Whilst it's true that given that it's a year from now when whatever it is will have been submitted - and that therefore if you want an image taken in May/June then it has to have been now - maybe that isn't an absolute in terms of a good idea for a project anyway. So I'm taking a week or two off and intend just taking some pictures for enjoyments sake. The stripped bark of the tree above caught my attention and gave me an excuse to take the picture here. Sometimes a simple visual moment is enough.

Out And about

2009-06-02T15:41:00.000+01:00

A trip down to London - primarily to see Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart on their take of 'Waiting For Godot' - gave the chance to think about photography and what it really means as an artform. Outside of any immediate concerns with the MA and away from my own practice, it's easier to reflect on what the medium really has to offer.

An early stop at the Haunch Of Venison gave an opportunity to view the latest work from Thomas Joshua Cooper. I have been a long time admirer of his landscapes, and am the proud owner of both "Dreaming The Gokstadt' and 'Some Rivers, Some Trees, Some Rocks, Some Seas'. On this occasion though I was a little more quizzical about the work. Not least because the images have been blown up in scale and for me at least lose some mystery as a result. They also, dare one say it? and does it matter? looked a little old fashioned - or maybe I simply mean had less to say to us nowadays? I am also troubled, presently, by the issue of colour. By chance I happened upon some recent colour prints by Dan Gustav Cramer in the excellent Maddox Gallery show 'Terra Nihilus' that were in my mind far more satisfactory landscape works. A case for more reflection on my part I think.

In another place - Hauser & Wirth - David Claerbout was showing three new video works. One of my fellow students is a Claerbout fan - as am I - and these latest works did not disappoint. One in particular, up in the top of the building - in the room it was made - entitled The American Room (1st movement) was a marvellous piece of work with so much to say about time and place and photography as a medium and its relationship to film. It had a powerful poetic quality that is impossible to describe - a must see in my judgment!

Away From The Flock

2009-05-22T11:55:00.000+01:00

Well its all over for a week or two. The work is submitted, the group dispersed after a drink at the pub round the corner. Was I alone in feeling - Is That It? But I guess that feeling of deflation is inevitable. I, for one, and I suspect I'm not alone, am keenly awaiting the information with regard to the next assignment. Of course we know roughly what's expected, the handbook tells us that, but one always has the feeling that the current info is needed before you start piling into the project.

I think I know what I want to do - but have sneeking feelings for one or two other ideas as well. I am showing some prints in Germany in August and got quite a wry response to the idea that one of the pictures might be a sunset... Its interesting how some subjects and treatments are so cliched that an honest response to them is virtually impossible? I have looked at other work where what could easily be dismissed as hackneyed is lauded... Context is o course everything I guess but nonetheless there are strange perspectives at work in the contemporary art environment.

Over and out

2009-05-18T19:54:00.000+01:00

Thats it! The project is complete...though I didn't quite make it with every one of my favoured subjects I did have thirteen from which to make the selection of ten. Although I still feel dissatisfied - when is it otherwise? - I do think I've made quite a personal journey. I now have some understanding of portraiture and a feeling for coherence in terms of a portfolio of images. Some progress too with the use of equipment and processes that necessarily go with it.

I may even push on with the idea - not in terms of my studies on the MA, where I'm firmly thinking around landscape - but simply as a personal project. Pushing onwards into other locations and subjects...who knows what might emerge from it.

For now though that blessed relief and euphoria when something is put to rest and one can move on! This photograph is one of those that didn't make the final selection.

Steadying The Ship

2009-05-08T17:09:00.000+01:00

I'm trying hard to keep some focus on my studies at a really difficult time. I have taken a decision to leave my current role at the University of Derby and in part, at least, return to self-employment. The upside of this ought to be more time to devote to my MA, the downside, for now, is that I'm working harder than ever. There's just so much to do at present. Yesterday however I did pull in two more sessions and so theoretically have enough material now to make a submission. I am clinging onto the notion that focus in the essay will result from the production of the final images!

Diversionary tactics

2009-05-06T08:48:00.000+01:00

In trying to complete a task I'm a terrible prevaricator - added to which a variety of other pressures to get things done - and the project that has to be completed and handed in exactly two weeks today is still a way off. I'm shooting more subjects this week...and trying to set up several more for next. Leaving a few days to make the prints and the final selection...oh, and the small matter of an essay that still consists of 70% unedited notes.

Ah well...best not to worry or panic. The materials for printing and submitting are now to hand. There is at the least some clarity in the conception of the pictures and if I could just settle to it the essay should be relatively straightforward. Though goodness knows what feedback I'll receive from the really rough draft I submitted last week.

So why was I in the painting studio this past Friday, Saturday, Sunday? Because I needed to distance myself from the other - as well as complete the move from my previous space within the studio complex to the larger space I now inhabit. I tend to work on a number of parallel themes/projects simultaneously and moving across allows me to do this more easily. One project is a series of roughly 50x40 cms paintings on panels - entitled the 'Ivanhoe' series and each image (though they are entirely non-referential) named after a town/village/hamlet in North West Leicestershire - which used to style itself 'Ivanhoe Country' for tourism purposes! This body of work had stalled in around 2006 when I had a period of enforced inactivity due to heart surgery and its only been this past weekend I've been able to stretch out and start work on these pictures again. This one is no. 14 in the series (and its a bit weird that the project stalled at 13 images if you like that sort of coincidence!) - which place it will be named after is yet to be decided...

Deflation

2009-04-29T21:01:00.000+01:00

Feeling strangely and unnaturally deflated today. I ran out of road with the draft of the essay and had to leave a large section of 'untreated' notes at the heart of it - not that this matters especially at this stage. But somehow I feel I'm falling short with the project as a whole with the text in such a state. I am also keen to pull in at least four more sittings before finally deciding on the selection and sequence of prints. At present there are eleven subjects - if I can make that 15 I can discard around a third in making the final group. So all's well then except it seemed as if others had achieved clarity over the project as a whole and could in consequence have a near completed text...hence my discomfort...pitiful really!

I need to be a little more bullish about the pictures maybe. Maybe, they arn't as incoherent as I suspect. Only time will tell. What I have discovered is that there is a reason that portraiture hasn't been on my radar previously...I simply don't have the passion for it. My interests are in landscapes, increasingly local landscapes as well as more exotic ones (as in the accompanying picture to this entry), and our relationship to it. In the past I'd thought this was simply because it informed my painting activity but I now feel it may be deeper than that.

Anyway - Cake File: this week a cornucopia of delights...cakes (lemon and chocolate), a lemon pie, apple pie and - although they were all nice - the highlight - scones and clotted cream with homemade jam - it must have been Daisy's doing!

Crunch Time

2009-04-29T09:42:00.000+01:00

This morning is a real pinch point in my MA. Today a draft of the essay to contextualize the practice project has to be submitted. There is a collection of random thoughts and observations sitting on the very computer I'm typing this into but turning that into a coherent and meaningful commentary is really tough going. I've advised quite a few of my PhD candidates to do this stuff but actually putting it into practice oneself! The biggest bugbear is that the creative process doesn't lend itself to a conventional narrative nor to extensive textual analysis insofar as visual work is concerned. This is I believe doubly the case in photography rather than painting, for example, because the actual moments of production, the point at which the shutter is clicked or the printer button pushed, i.e. the moment of decision taken is instantaneous. Of course digitisation has drawn these practices closer together again...the use of photoshop alone, much less the technical advantages of RAW file manipulation, suggest something more akin to 'traditional' studio painting practice, but the decisions taken in the complex interaction between photographer, sitter and situation - constituting a deal of the 'content' are so critical to outcomes.

Of course this ought to be finding its way into the text I'm writing (it probably will as I'm using these posts as an aide memoire) but only if I get on with the job rather than using this as a diversion tactic! Oh to be back in Athens on a fine spring evening with a cold glass of Retzina...

Out and about

2009-04-25T10:53:00.000+01:00

Yesterday saw the opening of a clutch of new shows and Derby Museum & Art Gallery. We went along and were particularly keen to see a selection of the Museum's landscapes mixed in with a small selection of work by local artists who focus on this subject matter. Amongst the works were two pictures of Peak District landmarks by Nick Lockett who came along to talk to us last semester. They looked extremely good - not least contrasted with some eighteen century topographical sketches (with annotations) of the Derbyshire Peak - in their own way both artists with a strong, almost obsessive, desire to capture the detail in the peak albeit through very different means. The whole show reminded me that, when push comes to shove, this is where my own passion in making art (be it paintings or photographs) lies and where I'm sure my major project will rest.

Nonetheless I'm now working with over twelve subjects in my current portrait project and have had my first request from someone to be added into the equation! This chuffed me to bits! I still lack any confidence in the photographs but feel I have to see it through as the project now...I've a text and a dozen pictures after all and there simply isn't time to change tack again. So there it rests. The picture today is of one of the most recent of the portrait shots.

Nose to the Stone

2009-04-21T16:28:00.000+01:00

Today I have completely focussed on my project for hand in at the end of this semester. A substantive rewrite of the text accompanied by a first stab at printing out seven of the 'final' images. 'Final' in that the prints always reveal certain small issues that simply never appeared on screen (even allowing for the arcane mysteries of the printing process itself) and suggest tweaks and changes, especially the more of the chosen images you have in front of you.

Another aspect of the process that infuriates is the requirement to write the accompanying text in the third person, one understands the need for 'critical distance' in the writing up of commentary and the importance of not simply saying "i did this and that' etc., but inevitably the journey travelled is a (the?) vital part of any body of work and is easier for being a first person narrative.

Nonetheless the reflection on the conceptual, formal and procedural aspects of producing a coherent body of work is exactly what will give it coherence in the end. Though this too requires a curious discipline in that the creative journey continues of course well beyond the point of the writing process that in any event is taking place right now whilst the production of images, much less prints, is inevitably on-going. No way round it of course, but slightly unreal! Meanwhile another image from the series that I now think I may call (though it be everso corny) 'Masters Of Arts'...

A Week in the Sun - and some reflection

2009-04-18T13:30:00.000+01:00

It's amazing what a week in sunshine does for the spirits! I returned yesterday with a crazy schedule of new portraits to complete - five sessions in a single day...exhausting for someone who nowadays shies away from hard work...

However I now have, for better or worse, a clear methodology and a clearer concept to work with and a very finite timescale in which to complete. By next Wednesday evening I will have a complete set of pictures and the broad outline for the text. Putting me hopefully in the right place for the following Wednesday when we return to the programme (with a draft essay in hand).

I've not yet studied yesterday's images but at least the project now 'feels' right - my gut instinct is that the images look stronger and more coherent when I look down the lens. And a bonus is that the niggling details...positioning, edges, sitters movements and gestures, expressions and so on can be concentrated upon because the basic compositional format has been resolved.

In addition my strongest impulse, to formalize the composition and unclutter the frame, fits with my natural inclinations as an artist. Despite the indexical nature of the photograph, inspite of it, I'm making the pictures bend to my way of seeing. So at least I'm happier with the outcomes...though whether the markers will remains to be seen.

And as an illustration - a holiday landscape, 'them thar hills', Apuane Alps, to be exact...with a few drops of rain amongst glorious sunshine!

Pandora's!

2009-04-06T18:02:00.000+01:00

I pushed a week or so back for the group to start thinking about what we might do by way of a show etc. to mark the end of our course. Given my background in the 'art business' I felt I owed it to everyone to impart at least one sensible recommendation - that we start sorting out our thoughts now given the necessary lead in times to successful shows, websites, publications etc.

As the erudite will know Pandora opened a large clay pot rather than a 'box' out of which poured all the world's ills etc! I seem to have done much the same...the email traffic has been voluminous and the range of ideas substantial...no matter as hopefully like Pandora, we may find hope at the very bottom of the jar....

Settling the Matter

2009-04-04T10:39:00.000+01:00

Yesterday and very early this morning I have been wrestling with the project and exactly how it will turn out. This past week's crit was useful even though it confirmed how far off the mark what I'd done to date was. Of course there were divergent opinions and ideas but it gave me an opportunity to distance myself from the pictures and the underlying impulses behind them. When I came back to considering the outcomes on Friday I was still troubled. However with a deal of cogitation over the day, a night sleeping on it and some conversation with my number one 'critical friend' (NOCF) early today I'm settled (for better or worse) on it.

I shall contrast desk bound shots with contextual images within the 'arena' that the subjects operate. This will follow on from the Dance Centre Director images - those I feel best about to date. I think that pushing the subject back into the context (wherever possible a 'clean' environment) gives me a clearer sense of articulation of the individual and their ambit and - importantly - my relation to it. In some ways (and as two people have pointed out) this pushes the pictures formally back into a place I'm emphathetic to, they even look a little like some of Edgar Martins photographs!

So I'm pushing on now with new subjects (more of those people who work in arts contexts) and with a defined idea of what the images must look like. Hopefully I can assemble enough to fulfill the project brief now in the time left. Whether it will totally hold together, conceptually or visually, will be for others to decide - at least I'll be prepared to stand behind the finished brief.

In the spirit of looking forward NOCF and I discussed the 'major' project as well...in part stimulated by reflection on the current process, in part by remarks of Nick Lockett's in his talk last semester that one should be planning now. I have an idea now of what it will be...more of that to come but the image here is a clue to the thinking.

Veering away from the Script

2009-04-01T11:29:00.000+01:00

The most recent shoot I did coupled with the prep for the upcoming crit later today has given me pause for thought. I'm also writing up the critical commentary that has to accompany the body of work we submit. This too has provoked some fresh thinking around the subject and whether I'm getting it right at present.

My thoughts are that my subject group is actually too diverse, what does it say about me? and is that at all interesting or significant. One of my colleagues pointed this out a week or two ago and its been at the back of my mind since. My impulse in taking these pictures is nowhere near as clearcut as I have been thinking...

So it's a period of reflection today and tomorrow before throwing myself back into whatever it is that is going to constitute the final submission! Kidnapped by my own ruminations!

Away From The Flock

2009-03-30T18:09:00.000+01:00

Between the last two sessions of the MA, two weeks of seminar presentations, I was out of the UK in Barcelona (see obligatory "stranger asked to take photo in Park Guell). Ostensibly we were there for our honeymoon but, both being artists, still couldn't resist visiting a few shows. In truth we didn't see a lot we liked...except one truly stonking show that was quite outstanding and revelatory. The show was by Kiki Smith. If you've just followed the link you'll have got a flavour of it - in the galleries it was truly sensational. Not least for the centrality it gave to the drawing process, as much as for the intensity of the content. In amongst everything else (drawing, sculpture, installation) were three excellent photographic portraits, intense blackness barely revealing the subject but saying so much with seemingly so little. It inspired and cowered me in equal measure.

The seminars were interesting, although in truth they sometimes lost their way...especially in week two when the time control went awry and there wasn't the focus that we were instructed to keep to (we are supposed to have a strict 15 minutes per colleague). It may be that the whole group size makes it tough to fully engage and I'll hold my hand up that - just occasionally - my full attention drifts in and out. I suspect I may not be alone. Perhaps consideration could be given to splitting up the group (we did that previously) into two...seven people can have a conversation of sorts - 16 or 17 really can't.

I'm amazed at how diverse the projects are turning out to be and in awe of several of the others who have a level of innate ability in terms of both clarity of ideas and technical execution. I feel quite vulnerable having yet to achieve either!

Cake File: I ate some lovely cake, in fact three slices, but am blowed if I know what it was...I think Daisy made it again...she makes a fair few cakes and - blow me - has even photographed herself doing so!

Hard Nose The Highway

2009-03-30T17:30:00.000+01:00

And now its starting to get a little crunchy. This coming week we have to present some hard copy...prints that is...to show how the assignment is shaping up. Last week I managed two more shooting sessions and unfortunately the next three are not going to happen before tomorrow. So I have been working with what I have now.

Fortunately one of the sessions produced - at last! - what I think may be a workable image in terms of the final selection. I certainly hope so as its going to be hard to get another full round of sessions with all subjects in time for the submission dates so really I have to settle now on what I want to show and of course that means deciding primarily on what I'm trying to say.

So far I've been fiddling around the idea of how these 'professionals' interact with the context in which they normally operate...in most cases at a desk. Visually this isn't that dynamic (how can it be) but more importantly it makes in tough to engender a sense of their own embodied image of themselves and is also distracting and fussy in terms of a true portrait of an individual. In this most recent session I moved the subject, a Dance Centre Director, into the deserted auditorium he presides over and placed him, a little uncomfortably for him I think, right in the centre of it. By luck rather than judgment (although I am making some progress with the technical stuff) I got the lighting right - an even flash light that the darkness around the subject swallowed up - and focussed in on the full figure. The combination of the various elements works for me at least and I feel confident enough in the outcome to want to try and work with my other subjects in the same manner.

This will - I hope - say more about the aspect of vulnerability that those with high profile 'presence' exhibit in their professional capacity...something I'm acutely conscious of as I divest myself of those trappings as well produce a coherent set of visually striking images that I can stand behind.

The Harvey Jones Principle

2009-03-25T22:17:00.000Z

Unless you go back a bit you won't remember the management guru, Sir John Harvey Jones, ex ICI Chief who became one of the first tellie pundits. I have always liked one of his maxims...not least because I've never quite understood its meaning...and I paraphrase...

"Planning is an unnatural process, and the beauty of not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise rather than being preceded by a period of worry and despair."

So goes my first practical project for this course. And I still don't know whether I'm falling one side or the other of this. I have now got (and as of tomorrow will have more) very nearly enough subjects for the 'professional engagements' idea and have made first shoots with most of them. The results are hardly promising and what I am trying to get across still isn't entirely clear to me. There are plenty of images, 'straight' portraits from a variety of angles including the initially favoured high vantage, wide angle shot based (very loosely) on the Degas portrait. In addition I've shot close ups of hands and one or two other 'ideas' (for which read just trying out other possible poses etc.). Nothing is really getting to the heart of what I had planned and more importantly the pictures simply don't 'engage'.

So there is much pondering to do over the next six days before the eve of Easter crit where we need to put images on the table. Meanwhile fortunately I had no prep for this week's session as I've just returned from a thoroughly enjoyable fve days in Barcelona (a short honeymoon trip) where I was able to take some pictures - just for fun - including the above.

Oh and Daisy does it again...Cake File...something really delicious that she "just threw together with what was around" - now if I could only make a set of pictures as good using the same methodology!

Other Fish

2009-03-17T18:41:00.000Z

Given that I re-married last Saturday its a wonder that I'm able to post at all from last week to this. However as we don't leave for Barcelona until Thursday I have a moment or two to reflect on the week past. Our lecturer for the week was artist, photographer and lecturer, Wiebke Leister. It may be just my prejudice at work but her talk was substantially based on her work for a practice based PhD, how we came up with this as an academic community I can't entirely remember (though I was there at the time!), but I have considerable reservations about it as a generator of worthwhile outcomes in terms of aesthetic product. I say this despite being a reasonably experienced supervisor myself - and I do know of quite a few practitioners who have negotiated this tricky business, including (or so I'd like to think) several of my own students. Wiebke's project 'Unjoyful Laughter and the Non-Likeness of Photographic Portraiture' was of interest to me given my own project but I found it hard to move beyond the theoretical construct she had devised and into the images themselves. Not that these were uninteresting (or that the theory didn't have some merit) but just that I struggled to fully engage. So much so that I unintentionally unnerved our speaker by my quizzical looks! I was simply trying hard to focus on the theoretical construct and marry it to the images presented. A good deal of the construct centred around the grimace as the further shore of the laugh...and this image was used to 'anchor' the others selected. I think she was on to something with this but I confess that I couldn't concentrate sufficiently on the work visually to take me beyond my initial prejudice.

Fallow Period...

2009-03-10T16:34:00.000Z

What with one thing and another I haven't managed to post since ahead of last week's session - and it's very nearly time for another. Last week was one of the most interesting sessions since we started. Both Greg Lucas and Paul Hill did presentations and there was much to ponder. Greg introduced me to one or two artists I've previously ignored, Andreas Slominski being one of them. He was focussing on the subject of narration and sequencing and gave an interesting and eclectic range of sources we could consider drawing upon, how pertinent this will be to many of us I'm none too sure - it made me think hard about how limited my ambition for my project might be - but it was very informative as well as entertaining, though Greg is always at the very least entertaining! Paul took us through his back catalogue in a thoughtful and provoking manner and brought us up to date with some of his current work and preoccupations including work that draws upon some difficult areas of loss and grief. It was a real privilege to have access not only to the work but to the very direct and honest commentary that Paul provided. The ability to connect simply and honestly into the thinking process behind images is not something that widely available, but Paul Hill has it in spades - worth the entrance money alone!

Cake File - Daisy is in overdrive now...this week's cake had everything going for it...she just can't stop baking.

Thinking Through the Subject

2009-03-02T16:02:00.000Z

Here is one of the pictures from my latest session - I now have five completed and am beginning to get a 'feel' for how to go about the process. Firstly I get in quick and get set up fast...start shooting quickly and accept that the first dozen or so are likely to be 'loss leaders'. Talk through the subject and listen to their responses, trying to get them animated. I am now thinking that I will take them out of their immediate desk surroundings and into environments that are both comfortable to them and visually interesting to me. Having established a very formal and restrictive arrangement I'm realizing - doh! - that such a straitjacket is both condensing and unnecessary. SP is the Chair of the Board of an Arts Centre I'm a member of, and is herself a Director of another Centre. The desk element of her role is but one aspect of it and so on this occasion I moved the shoot out of the office and into the Gallery - and its one of those images I'm most taken with at the present. I'm also thinking that I need to shoot in bursts to get the facial expressions I require, another thing to consider alongside the compositional stuff (don't forget the edges!) and the lighting and the props and everything else!!

Time Out and...17 and a half out of 66...

2009-03-01T11:00:00.000Z

This week I missed out on a session, so cannot reflect on what I wasn't party to. Its only the second that I've missed,the first before Xmas through illness, and this time with a work commitment I couldn't avoid. I did feel that that something was missing from my week and intend not to lose another week this semester if at all possible.

Progress on the project has been fairly slow too. I have done two further sessions but the results are nowhere near good enough to use. Maybe that isn't critical yet (there's time to go back) but I'd like to feel that I was getting somewhere with those aspects of the images that I'm particularly interested in...and at the moment it doesn't feel like it. I need to step back from the composition of the image and reflect on it - but my desire to get pictures taken without too much fuss is getting in the way of this...and also not allowing me sufficient time to check all the technical issues. I've printed one or two images as well...but I really don't want to sidetrack myself into issues around making prints, just having something to look at on paper is what's useful...quality is not the issue as yet.

I have another session fixed for tomorrow so at least I'm getting a raft of images under my belt now. And the issue of whether or not to have the feet in....

Well I have been looking at Wolfgang Tillmans' portraits...and counted 17 and a half feet out of 66 portraits...so maybe not so important as other considerations after all!