Preparing for Assessment – Assignment Three

This assignment gave me a lot of trouble, as I’ve already recorded earlier in this blog and elsewhere in notes exchanged with my tutor.  I don’t intend to revisit those struggles – partly of my own making, I think, but also partly related to the nature of the brief itself.  What matters here is how I have looked at the assignment for my assessment submission and the changes that I have made – and why.

·         All the images have been reprinted, with small adjustments to just about all of them as my Photoshop and printing skills have improved since they were first done.

·         I have taken note of some specific suggestions from my tutor, resulting in:

·         The replacement of one of the interior images of Huddersfield’s Queensgate Market, which seemed to add little – this one.

The new image is an external view that includes the ‘iconic’ external artwork referred to in my original notes and also shows the external extension of the concrete curves into the external structure.  It is questionable whether it strictly meets the brief, which focuses on function, but it does add variety – and I guess one of the buildings functions would be to act as an iconic reference point in the town’s architectural landscape.  It certainly does that, as this images shows –and with a strong reference back to its 1970’s origins.

·         There is also a change in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park Visitor Centre group; this time an additional image.  My notes referred to the fact that this building acted as a bridge through formal gardens, but there were no images that confirmed that.  The closest I could get was this image, which confirms the busy, transient nature of the space’s function, but also demonstrates, to a degree, how it uses the large window space to involve the visitor in the external aspects of the park as well.



·         As well as these small changes, I have introduced a new location into the series.  Whilst working on the assignment last year, I had photographed a house that we stayed in on holiday in France, and its gardens.  Working under my restricted interpretation of the brief, I had originally decided not to include it, but having been encouraged to take a less restrictive approach, I have now added it in.  One of my key reasons for doing this is because I felt that the images I took then represented something closer to a personal response to a ‘place’ and less of a mechanical response to a brief.  To my mind that gives them a little more merit and value than some of the others.  It also adds another dimension of variety to the overall submission.  These are the images.

I am, overall, still left with a feeling of dissatisfaction about the outcomes on the assignment.  Whilst I have produced, in the end, a large set of images covering a variety of places and spaces, which meet the requirements of the original brief, I find them largely uninspiring and uninspired.