Crunch Time is here!

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.