I had a good discussion with my tutor following submission of Assignment 1. Although he will send me a written summary of his feedback, I am doing this write-up based on the notes I took during our chat. Robert’s comments about the assignment were positive and I found them both encouraging and an opportunity for further reflection.

I mentioned that I had changed my original vision for the assignment, which was to have two images of each scene, one with frozen people and the other where the length of exposure meant that traces of people disappeared entirely. I did try this, but I decided that I wanted to leave a trace of movement similar to the way that Alexey Titarenko had done with his series. The reason I did this was not to follow Titarenko, but to avoid confusing viewers who would see every second image with a background and no people at all. I was concerned that this would be “too conceptual” and Robert replied that being conceptual is not a problem in a course like this! To my mind, “too conceptual” means that I would have to explain to viewers what they were looking at, because it would not be at all obvious from the images. I suppose that some of my reaction is because I do not want to produce images that are so conceptually “heavy” they require lengthy written explanations. This is the case for two reasons: 1) if I wanted a description of a concept, I would use words rather than images; and 2) I think I would be embarrassed to produce work that was so precious or clever that it could not be understood without an arty accompanying text. I don’t see me moving from that position in the near future, but I am now better aware of my own discomfort.

All the same, Robert’s view was that my series was conceptually coherent and that I had successfully achieved the concept visually and elegantly.

A couple of minor points on the images themselves, the first pointed out by me and the second by Robert:

• the white balance was difficult to correct between the diptychs, but I managed to get close enough in every pair except the ones showing the Millennium Bridge and St. Paul’s (I may have another crack at this before assessment).
• the two images showing the casino in Leicester Square are slightly out of register (this will be easier to resolve and I will definitely fix it before assessment).

A more important point, however, was the fact that my series shows a side of the city that most Londoners do not frequent: tourist London. This was not my intent: I had merely wanted to be in places where I was guaranteed a steady pedestrian flow without a tripod slowing commuters down on their way to or from work. The unintended consequence, however, was that the places I chose were all tourist haunts—so the cumulative effect is a series that could very well be ‘read’ as a comment on tourists or tourism, rather than more neutrally on the camera’s exposure of our perception of time and the artificiality of the photographic record. In other words, I wound up ‘saying’ visually more than I meant to. I saw Robert’s point immediately and will make a point of paying more attention to this aspect of my work in future.

The final point we discussed was my use of the term ‘reality.’ I had used it to describe the way that people commonly act as though a photograph gives them some direct experience of the world around them (a “phenomenological” approach; Smith, 2018). I realize that I left my understanding of the term unspoken and will go back to my A1 text to rework it slightly before I submit it for assessment.

All in all, a very positive tutorial and some new points for me to reflect on as I continue developing my approach to building visual narratives.

Reference

Smith, D.W. (2018) ‘Phenomenology’ In: Zalta, E.N. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. At: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/phenomenology/ (Accessed on 23 July 2019)