“Photography & the City” – RPS Event at NMM

On Saturday, I attended a Royal Photographic Society organised event at the National Media Museum, entitled “Photography & the City”.  Fellow OCA student, Rob, was also there.  There were four speakers through the day:

Ian Beesley – Social documentary photographer and course leader on the MA in Photography at the University of Bolton;

Roger Hargreaves – photography writer & curator;

John Davies – contemporary documentary photographer;

Colin Harding – Curator of Photographic Technology at the NMM.

Ian Beesley presented images that he has shot in Bradford from late 70s to today.  They were almost exclusively black and white and mainly of architecture or urban detail; though there were some portraits or groups, mainly shot in a deadpan, posed manner in front of buildings, and at least one shot of children playing in the street.  I would have included a link here to some of his images but there seems to be nothing on the web.  Most of these photographs had been made in the late 70s and early 80s, when Beesley was in his late twenties or early thirties, and he said in his presentation that looking back at them made him realise that they had been about recreating his past, revisiting his childhood.  He was born in Bradford and grew up there.  The images were mainly high contrast, quite grainy, reflecting a gritty documentary style – he acknowledged Bill Brandt as an influence, including quoting him as having said that ‘photography is not a sport; there are no rules, I can do what I want’.

A confident and entertaining presenter, he adorned his images with some enjoyable tales of their creation and of the characters who peopled the Bradford of his youth – not least the fight between two blind piano players in a pub car park!  That said, there was some content that I found useful and informative – not least the images themselves, which reminded me also of the early Don McCullen photographs of Finsbury Park, London.  Those were earlier than Beesley’s, and showed bombed out streets peopled by gangs and down-and-outs rather than demolished mills and streets where only the pub or fish shop had been left standing – but they had some common ground, and not just the high contrast grainy black & white presentation.

He said that he sees that he has been photographing change, and he had even been back to some of the locations specifically for this presentation, to try and photograph what, if anything remained from his images of thirty years before.  In most cases, the answer was nothing, and he had even struggled to identify the exact location.  I think he was trying to avoid suggesting that the changes hadn’t been for the better, but that feeling did come through anyway.  Reflecting again on the style of the images, the grainy black and white, which he also used for the updated ‘today’ images, I find that I cannot avoid reading them as nostalgic and, as Beesley himself said, seeking to recreate and revisit the past.  What if all these images had been in colour?  Which they clearly could have been.  How would the narrative have looked then?

John Davies, with an international reputation (http://www.johndavies.uk.com/) had a high level of credibility, for me, not least because I have already looked at some of his work during my Landscape course.  That said, he struggled a little as a presenter and, at times, seemed to find it difficult to talk expressively about his work.  It was interesting to note that he identified his early direction and inspiration as surrealism.  He suggested that photography was more effective that painting in expressing a surreal aesthetic because of its connotations of reality, which gives it a strong potential to undermine.  His early work was chiefly landscape in the more rural and traditional sense ‘tackling’ a scene from a high vantage point, looking down and exploring the topography, using changes in weather and light quality; but he then went on to ‘look at cities’ through their industries.  We saw many of his characteristic high detail city landscapes, often exploring particularly ‘quirky’ architectural aspects.  He said that he often finds it difficult to explain why a particular location appeals to him, but he just sees some conflict, some edge, which ‘creates a sense of meaning’ for him – back to the surrealism and making people question the world and the tradition around them.  When talking about this image of Ladbroke Grove, London, taken in 1985, he noted the queue of people at the phone box, and then remarked that he is sometimes surprised to realise that his photographs have become historical documents.  That’s an interesting one; his website describes him as a contemporary documentary photographer, so I interpret the remark to mean that the images are made now, for now, to reflect the particular conflict or edge that he has seen and to encourage the viewer to see today differently.  25 years on, inevitably, some aspects of that edginess look dated.

I was particularly interested in something he had to say about his creative process.  It was said in the context of a current or planned project about Britain as a warmongering nation.  He said that he begins with a concept, with something to say, and then looks for strong graphic images that demonstrate that concept or message.  Of course, he was referring to his personal work rather than his commissioned work (I think), and he is well enough established to be able to take that approach, but I think that is something which could usefully inform my own work.  My images of Holmfirth in Assignment Four, were made to a plan, to a brief, but not in relation to any overarching concept or message.  As I said in my previous post, and as will be clear when I write up my tutor feedback, the resulting series does its job and satisfies the brief, but it doesn’t have much emotion or obvious message in it.

The other two presentations comprised an examination of Trafalgar Square as a recurring photographic subject and location, from a very early daguerretype from before Nelson’s Column was built to mobile phone images of today; and an illustration & description of the work of the street ‘smudgers’ (‘stop me and have one taken’ photographers)..  Of passing interest, there wasn’t too much in either to inform one’s image making, but I did reflect on the comparison between the ‘unchanging architectural backdrop’ of Trafalgar Square and the very definitely ‘changing architectural backdrop’ of Beesley’s picture of Bradford.

A useful day; good to have the opportunity to talk with a fellow student again as well; and I got the chance for a very quick look at the Donovan Wylie exhibition at the NMM, which I want to back to in the next few weeks.

Assignment 4 - Submission

Having made the final selection of twelve images, they have now gone off to my tutor, with accompanying notes.  The twelve are as follows & then I have included my 'Summary & Assessment', which went with the detailed notes in the submission.

My twelve images do, I believe, fulfil the brief, with enough range and variety to show the character of Holmfirth & its people and sufficient scope for a selection of twelve images to illustrate an ‘intelligent, thoughtful’ article in a travel magazine.

·         There is variety in terms of subject, scale and type.  I think there might, on reflection, have been more ‘detail’ type images but, as indicated in the notes, some do offer scope for cropping.

·         There is, I think, a good range of signs and indicators as to the nature of Holmfirth & the people that one encounters – not a comprehensive range necessarily, but then that would be very difficult to achieve in any circumstances.

·         Some of the characteristics I came up with in my planning, those that I particularly wanted to demonstrate, were rugged, busy, rather quirky, complicated, quite eclectic; and my images have a sort of ‘no frills’ feel about them, which fits with those characteristics.  My meaning here is that they don’t show a great deal of creativity in, for example, use of focus and focal length, camera angle, etc but this, for me, is a natural reaction to a rugged, no-nonsense, Pennine town.

·         Despite the variety of subject and style, I feel that they hang together successfully, and it is possibly the common theme of stone and stone buildings that supplies a visual link throughout.

·         If there is one characteristic from my list above that could perhaps have been illustrated more effectively it would be the ‘busy’ nature of Holmfirth.  It is there, in one or two, but there might have been ‘people on the move’ type images that would have given another dimension.

·         There are some aspects of the town that have not been illustrated.  Holmfirth has a historic link with cinema – both production and showing – which doesn’t appear; but I think a more important one is the river.  Water has been significant as a driver of the industrial revolution, as a source of destruction & death (three floods), and as a characteristic of the towns visual attraction today.  Water appears in one image, but there might have been more.

·         One positive worth mentioning is that people appear in nine of the twelve images selected, which is genuine progress for me and a direct reflection of the way my photography has developed during this course.  And I have already referred to the specific progress in creating arranged, posed portraits.

·         I wonder whether a picture editor would feel that there were enough eye-catching images; maybe the choice of ‘openers’ is limited to just two or three – perhaps relates to my comment above about use of creative techniques.

·         In reflecting on the series, I find myself making a comparison with some work that has featured a few times in my blog discussions – the ‘From Back Home’ works of Anders Petersen & J H Engstrom.  My blog of 23^rd March 2011 contains some thoughts on this work and the reason I mention it here is that the series is all about a ‘place’ that is familiar to both of them.  In their case, they were producing a personal piece of work, reflecting an emotional expression of the part of Sweden in which they both grew up.  The key word I want to bring up is in that sentence – ‘emotional’.  I don’t think there is much sign of an emotional response in my images of Holmfirth.  The series reflects more of an objective, stand back and observe attitude.  That is, perhaps, appropriate for a magazine article, but could be a legitimate criticism of the series from an aesthetic or creative viewpoint.  As a general observation, and one I have made elsewhere, I think ‘emotion’ is often lacking in the work I produce – something to be aware of and to reflect on again.

This has been an interesting and useful exercise in which I think that I have successfully planned my approach around a brief; effectively moved forward in terms of my photography of people, including people aware and involved with the process; implemented the planning quite successfully; and produced a competent and workable set of images in the context of the assignment.

Assignment 4: progress report

I might, ideally, have blogged my progress on the assignment bit by bit over the last few weeks but, frankly, I havn’t had the time – work + OCASA + trying to progress the assignment itself.  The good news is that I am more or less there, with my 12 images chosen.  They need a little more tweaking for final print & then I have the notes to write, but I hope to complete that over the next week or so.  I’m not necessarily going to put my final choices into this note; it is more of a reflection on what I’ve done and how it has gone.  I havn’t ended up with exactly the pattern of images that I planned, but not far off.

These are the ‘overview’ images that made it to the long list.

The first two are ‘repeats’ of images that I have made before, with the first creating an attractive overview of the Holme Valley, the town nestling in the bottom of the valley and clear evidence of the textile mill history visible via the chimneys.  The second is a more intimate view from the other side of the valley, with an indication of the way the town is built onto the steep hillsides.  The ones that follow reflect an attempt to show more clearly the way the town sits at the end of a valley,  sometimes resulting in an almost claustrophobic feel.

The second of this group of three has some technical issues – not as sharp as I’d like, but it does reflect how the town centre feels closed in.  It’s interesting to note that I have often observed this sense when driving into the town from either of two directions.  When I went to take the photographs, I found that the view from the pavement was subtly different – and the middle of the road wasn’t an option!  The first and third above are both taken from a small piece of wasteland, just off one of the main roads, leaning over a temporary fence around a building site!

I planned to take some ‘people-oriented’ images and to make at least some of these portraits of shop/restaurant owners in the town centre.  I have done three such arranged images, in the end, as follows.  Firstly, the joint owners of Mezze, a town centre ‘eatery’ & bar.  I had the idea that my portraits might reflect ‘old style’ posing – the frontal, standing/leaning pose that one associates with early photography (necessitated by slow shutters, of course), which could also reflect Holmfirth’s roots in the industrial revolution.  At the same time, I wanted to make them obviously contemporary – not least by using colour.  That is exactly the approach I discussed with Adam & Sam, below, which I think they have carried off pretty well!

The building in the image below is one of the oldest in the town, dating back, almost certainly, to the fifteenth century.  It is what remains of a row of cottages that fell into the river.  It was, apparently, a pie shop back in the fifties, but its current use (and the one it has had for 40+ years) is very clearly signified in this portrait of another local tradesman.

Once again, he has followed my ‘brief’ very well, I think!

The third ‘arranged’ portrait proved a little harder to implement.  Gary is a tour guide.  He meets coach loads of visitors to the Holme Valley, by prior arrangement with the tour operators, and provides a commentary as they are driven around the local TV sites associated with ‘Last of the Summer Wine’ and ‘Where the Heart Is’, both of which have used the area extensively for location filming.  He also takes ‘on foot’ town centre tours to places like ‘Norah Batty’s House’ and ‘Sid’s Cafe’.  I was able to take a shot of him waiting, with his dog.  But, as soon as the coach pulled in, it was all action as he leapt on board to ‘sell his wares’, decked out in blonde wig, microphone in hand.  I felt a bit like the paparazzi trying to grab an image of a celebrity as he went about his business – then, the doors closed and they were away.

But I did grab this one, through the door of the coach – and it does have a ‘sense’ of place in the background, with the stone built weavers’ houses visible in the background.

I’m quite pleased with the way the ‘people’ pictures have turned out – reflects the increased confidence in asking people for portraits and then producing something reasonable.

In my planning, I also made reference to some images from this year’s Holmfirth Folk Festival; but I had another opportunity for something similar during September, with a Festival of Food & Drink.  The town has regular markets in the Market Hall on several days of the week, but this was a weekend festival, taking over large parts of the town centre.  I spent a couple of hours there on the Saturday, but was a little disappointed by the outcomes, which I felt were, on the whole, a little too ‘generic’ to be relevant to this assignment.  Here are a few of the images from the day, and I think the first, although still fundamentally ‘generic’, could work as an illustration of the fact that the town does host festivals and does, from time to time, get very busy.



I also planned a ‘heritage’ element to the selection.  There is some oblique reference to the industrial heritage in some of the images above, but the next few were specifically targeted in that direction.  The first is detail of a mill, including its name and date of opening – 1869 – and a terrace of cottages next door.  It is a good representative shot of the heritage architecture around the town.  The second is taken within ten minutes walk of the centre of town and shows a disused mill pond, with a brick built (unusual) chimney behind, and clear evidence of the contemporary use to which the mill pond has been put.  (I took this image with the full knowledge and involvement of the man fishing.)  Then the final one signifies the ongoing process of change in the valley – mill buildings recently demolished and the even older heritage of grazing land & dry stone walling behind.

Finally, I wanted to include other images around the town centre, some at the detail level and maybe one or two that included reference to the heavy traffic that passes through.  The first is a general image with quite familiar view that I have taken before.  It shows a familiar Holmfirth skyline, with the church tower and the cottages rising up the hillside behind it, but I have chosen to use a wide angle, which puts that view into the context of the small car park and bus station that sits immediately in front of it.  This where visitors to the town are most likely to start their visit and, on the right, is where Gary waits for his coach parties.  I quite like the way that the cloud is bursting from behind the church, on a typically blustery day.

Picking up on the car theme, the next is one that I actually took on one of my early ‘scouting’ sessions, but which I have never managed to better for an interesting image that also tells the story of Holmfirth’s battle with the internal combustion engine!  The colour makes it potentially effective for a magazine article, and I worked on quite a tight crop of the original, which makes the lorry seem to be almost upon us whilst at the same time dwarfing the people trying to drink coffee and eat ice cream at the pavement cafe behind.

Looking for detail led me to take the following two photographs, but they have turned out to have more than detail in them.

In the first, I was working on a shot of the old signpost and mileage sign on the side of one of Holmfirth’s two small bridges when these two ladies walked in front of it and then stopped to look over into the river.  One, obligingly, was wearing a striking purple coat, giving me a colourful composition with the brick wall and tree; but there is more in this image.  Notice the very narrow and uneven pavement that they are negotiating, and bear in mind that they are about 20-30 metres from where I took the previous image!  They are, by the way, typical of Gary’s customers.  In the second, below, it was the sign in the stone on the wall that I was targeting.  It indicates the height the water reached when Holmfirth was flooded after a reservoir collapsed in 1852 – and it clearly would have comfortably covered the two people who appeared in my picture.

Two more detail pictures below provide unusual views of familiar aspects of the town centre, and I could see either of these acting as useful ‘fillers’ in a magazine article.

The first looks down from the side of the church towards the old cinema, which still performs that very function from time to time and is also a highly popular venue for gigs, as demonstrated by the banner outside.  Then finally, there is this absolutely typical scene of the small cobbled streets and alleys around the town centre, which house a range of small shops that attract the visitors and which certainly provide much of the character of the town centre environment.

There are 22 images here, which is more or less in line with my guess at a 20 image long list.  They have been taken over about ten or twelve different sessions, including three for the portraits, of course.  Living close to the town and being familiar with it, I have been able to make quick, short term trips as and when I needed.  I think that, in here, I have the variety from which to make a selection that gives a ‘sense’ of the place that is Holmfirth and which would have the potential to provide some choices for a magazine picture editor looking to illustrate and article about the town.  The initial research has helped; for example, looking at the magazines made me determined to include some portrait-style images, which do usually and rightly for part of a photographic presentation of ‘place’ in its roundest sense.  Of course, knowing somewhere well and living close certainly helps – but it also makes the choices tougher.  I know that there could be a whole host of other possibilities and variants that I might have included.  Doing a similar set of images over a longer period would allow for more public events; more arranged sessions; more opportunities to demonstrate the variations that the seasons bring to a place like Holmfirth.

One of the key things I’m pleased about is that I successfully set up the ‘people’ sessions and carried them off in an OK manner.  I already knew one of the people at Mezze, but the other two were ‘cold calls’, so to speak.  That gives me a certain amount of confidence to go forward and do more of the same, which might be particularly useful for one of the ideas I have in mind for Assignment Five.

I won’t try and analyse the overall effectiveness of my set of images until I am making the submission to my tutor, but I’m reasonably happy with the way the process has gone.

Study Visit – Whitechapel Gallery, London – Thomas Struth

On Saturday 3^rd September, I attended an OCA Study Visit to the Whitechapel Gallery, where there was an exhibition of photography by Thomas Struth.  In reflecting on the event (and these are immediate reflections, the day after the visit), I want to put it into a context, and a context with a number of strands.

The event is free, which is a great benefit to be had from studying with the OCA, but in this case, of course, it involved time and money travelling from Yorkshire to London, which makes one want to maximise the advantage.  In my case, that included choosing to travel the day before, with my wife, and visiting other galleries/exhibitions – good opportunities for comparison (see later) but also some potential for ‘gallery overload’!

Then there was the unexpected context – that some right-wing group, who shall remain nameless here, chose Saturday to plan a demonstration in Whitechapel, which meant that at least one left-wing group made sure that they would also be present, and which then ‘necessitated’ the presence of several thousand police officers from all over the UK – an unusual atmosphere in which to approach the gallery on Saturday morning!

Thirdly, this was an organised study visit, which naturally implies some formal element.  In this case a representative from the gallery led us around the exhibition, presenting certain background, themes and interpretations; and taking questions.

And then finally, there is the context that one is visiting the exhibition in a group, with others, not on one’s own.  The group included both students and tutors, some of whom I have come to know over the last year or so – a bit like meeting up with old friends – and others who I met for the first time.

Actually, I say finally, but there is perhaps another context.  Independent of this study visit, I happen to have read a fair amount about Struth’s work before.  He is, of course, well respected in the world of art photography so that his work appears in, and is commented on, in many places – two images in Stephen Shore’s ‘The Nature of Photographs’, for example, and in Charlotte Cotton’s ‘The Photograph as Contemporary Art’.  Even more significantly for me have been the pages devoted to Struth in Michael Fried’s ‘Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before’.  I won’t claim to have fully understood everything written in the latter, but the depth of analysis of Struth’s family portraits and his museum/audience images meant that I came to the exhibition with a fair amount of pre-awareness (baggage?).

And so ... to some reactions ...

It is difficult to ignore scale as a starting point.  Monumental is a word that has been used often about much contemporary art photography in galleries, and it is appropriate here.  Without doubt, seeing the images in this format is a very different experience from seeing them on the pages of books, and entirely different from seeing them on a monitor.  Since Struth intends them to be seen in this way, it is reasonable to assess them as such – but perhaps with one proviso.  Some of us watched a film that accompanied the exhibition, in which Struth talked about his work and specifically walked around the Whitechapel Gallery as the images were propped against the walls waiting to be hung.  He described the Whitechapel space as comparable to a ‘studio visit’ (and Michael Lawton, our guide for the exhibition had also mentioned this in passing); more intimate was the implication, and it might even have been said specifically by Struth.  That makes me wonder.  The images of museum spaces, places of worship etc often look into vast spaces and perhaps, ideally, Struth would see them hanging in similar large-scale galleries.  Certainly, there has to be an appropriate relationship between the size at which an image is presented and the space in which it is placed.  I partly mention it because I heard comment from more than one person that they were uncertain whether they liked the large scale presentation (and, if I’m honest, I was less impressed by it than I expected) and it just makes me reflect as to whether they might have looked different again in a larger, even more formal gallery environment.  No implied criticism of the Whitechapel or the hanging and presentation, just a question that comes to my mind.

That takes me to another topic of discussion that came up as we looked around informally and at leisure after the formal tour.  At this size, images are not as ‘sharp’ in the print as some of us might have expected (though, and again it is just a reflection after the event, I wonder whether some of the newer images were sharper and whether there is a technical development issue – assuming the older images were printed some time ago).  Of course, in a more intimate space we get drawn more easily to look closely at the surface, but I also remember having a similar sensation looked at very large scale prints of Joel Meyerowitz’s ‘Aftermath’ (from 2002) images at the National Media Museum.  Interestingly, I don’t recall this sensation with Simon Robert’s ‘We England’ at the NMM last year.  Since arriving home, I’ve noted another ‘print/presentation’ issue.  Tucked away in a corner at the Whitechapel was Struth’s ‘National Gallery 2, London 2001’ (seen here for sale at Christies – at a price that makes you think!).  In the version on show, and behind reflective Perspex, the left half was so dark that the only thing visible was one’s own reflection.  In the context of an exhibition where many of the works lead us into the issues around viewing art, the significance/role of the viewer etc, that was perhaps quite an effective (deliberate?) notion.  However, when I then look at the print in the exhibition guide and in my copy of Fried’s book, the dark shadow area on the left includes a corner of the gallery space, just visible, and a small segment of the rope that separates the viewer from the work.  Could be I was just careless when viewing it in the gallery, but I think this was a particularly dark version, or it wasn’t helped by the light.

OK – let’s acknowledge; I’m being especially picky here.  However, as I’ve visited more and more photography exhibitions over the last few years, I find myself looking closely at the way images are presented.  As you do that, you start to observe details that do or don’t work particularly well.  The other comparison that I find myself making, after also visiting the V&A and the National Portrait Gallery whilst in London, is how effective, really, are these large ‘gallery-size’ photographic images, as works of art, when one compares them with paintings, for example.  And that comparison (and this has nothing directly to do with the Struth exhibition) gets more complex when I take into account that several of the contemporary paintings on show at the National, in the BP Portrait Awards exhibition, were ultra-realistic, ‘photo-like’ oils.  I’m engaging with a big and complicated issue here, so not a lot of point trying to ask the question about which is best!  And, I have already admitted to the possibility of ‘gallery overload’!

Something else that comes about from regular visits to exhibitions is the tendency to ask the ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ questions.  In the film accompanying the exhibition, Struth came across as a quietly-spoken intellectual, highly thoughtful and quite intense.  His art is, I think, also highly intellectual, which means that the motivational aspect – the ‘Why?’ question – is also going to be complex.  I already knew that from the Fried commentary.  I have commented before in this blog that I am increasingly conscious of the complexity and intensity that goes into the making of art.  Compare Struth with Engstrom, for example, who has also featured in here before.  Both demonstrate this intensity of creativity – but in such different ways.  Struth, as I say, is the intellectual, the analytical, with a creative process that can take a very long time (eighteen months, he said in the film, for an image of Notre Dame, Paris) to produce a single, monumental piece of work that will be presented to us large-scale, but also in the context of ‘big scale’ issues about the nature of cutting edge technology or the meaning of paradise.  Engstrom, on the other hand, emotional and personal, can sometimes fire off spontaneous images that come from the heart and combine together into a series that takes you deep into his (your own) psyche.  I’m probably over-simplifying, but these seem like worthwhile reflections as one tries to unravel one’s own direction.

Picking up on a couple of the points I made earlier about context – I’ll just reflect on the ‘formal’ and ‘group’ aspects of a study visit such as this.  It wasn’t easy for our ‘guide’ to lead a group of 20+ people around a public gallery where there were other ‘paying guests’ around; and we seemed a very large group in a relatively small gallery.  In addition, I got the impression that at times he wasn’t quite sure where to pitch what he was saying to us – whether to go for the full-scale analysis of potentially complex works or just give the edited highlights.  For these reasons, I’m not sure that this formal aspect quite worked for me on this visit.  ‘Looking’ or ‘viewing’ exhibits in a group context isn’t easy anyway.  It has its merits, of course.  You discuss and compare views; you feed off each other; you see things that you wouldn’t see on your own; and so on.  But you don’t (or at least I don’t) spend personal time looking and reflecting and exploring.  I (yes, I’ll turn it back to the personal!) find myself aware of others and less focused on the art.  A sad admission, maybe, but I might be better at attending exhibitions on my own!!  What a loser, you think!

Actually, the greatest thing of all about attending an OCA Study Day such as this one is the interaction with others.  It is invaluable to have the chance for face-to-face exchanges (actually, in an exhibition, it is often side-by-side!) with tutors and students – not just about the exhibition but also the courses, the OCA, art/photography in general, distance learning.  As I said above, some are becoming ‘old friends’ and the network builds each time you meet new people.  Some of us, just before we left, reflected again on the desirability of finding ways to enable more effective interaction and support over the Internet.  That is something to take forward in my Student Association role.

Thanks to Gareth and OCA for organising; thanks to tutors who attended – much appreciated; thanks to fellow students; and sorry that I didn’t get a chance to talk to even more people.  Here’s to next time.

(A monumental blog for some monumental art, I think!!)

Project 19: A single figure small

Have been working on some of the projects in section four of the course whilst planning the fourth assignment and it’s time I wrote some of that up here.

My first example of a ‘single figure small’ is the classic isolated individual silhouetted as they walk across an empty landscape.  This image would be more or less worthless without the figure, and it could be argued that the figure is a bit too small.

Personally, I don’t mind it on this scale.  I feel that it really does give a sense of the wide open space in which this individual is walking.  The contrast between the dark figure and the light coloured sand is important, of course.  An alternative crop might be much tighter, for example.  The water in the foreground could be said to isolate the figure even more by seeming to leave them stranded on an island of sand.

Sometimes you need to have a small figure in the image just to define the scale of what the viewer is seeing.  Once again, in the example below, the figure is very small in the frame, and dressed in dark colours against a dark background.  Presented small in this log, it might be almost impossible to tell that she is there – but, in line with the comments in the notes, there is at least the element of surprise when the viewer does spot her.  The presence of the figure certainly does define the scale, which could be very confusing without it.

I’m also going to include a couple of examples where the figure is much less insignificant in size – still small enough to be anonymous, but big enough to be seen clearly.  I would suggest that, in both these cases, it is the presence of the figure, and their interaction with the environment (and the frame?) that makes the image into something remotely interesting.

A good and effective principle that has both compositional merit and the potential to fundamentally affect the narrative quality of the image.

Assignment 4: pulling together a plan

This isn’t going to be prescriptive but I have a rough plan of how my 12 images could be made up, based on the thinking covered in my previous two posts.

The series might comprise:

·         1/2 broad images of the town, in the context of its valley and its surroundings; I have two potential locations/angles in mind and I know that the best light for one will be a.m. and for the other late p.m.

·         3/4 people-oriented images; not that these will be the only ones including people, of course, but people will be the main subject. I probably will include one from my Folk Festival series, already shot in the context of this course and with this assignment in mind.  Then I hope to go for portraits for the others – 2-3 arranged/posed; probably local shopkeepers, bar/cafe owners; probably outside their premises.  Finally, in this category, I might look for an image that focuses on the tourists.

·         2/3 heritage-style images – and I have plenty of subject matter to go at here, perhaps just re-shooting some that I have already done, but trying to get people into some of them, for added interest and an element of ‘interacting with place’.

·         3/4 town centre images; and again I have some specific ideas – a wide angle image including car park and church that I have taken ‘roughly’ before; something showing the heavy traffic, ideally interacting with people; an angle on the Picturedrome from behind the church contrasting old architecture with names of rock bands; and no doubt 1 or 2 others.

·         3/4 detail shots, for which, again, I already have some idea.

That adds up to 12-17 images and, in practice, I can see how I might end up with a long-list of about 20.

This, on the face of it, looks like a lot of pre-planning, but I refer back to the idea that Holmfirth is a complex place, a bit of an odd mix, and so conveying as much of that as possible in a series of 12 images needs some thought.  Ideally, I will get all of this done in the next month.

Assignment 4: Holmfirth – more research & planning

I have been keeping a handwritten notebook in parallel with this online log for People & Place and, in there, have been doing some more work over the last couple of weeks to plan my approach to this assignment.  Since the detail is in the notebook, I’m not going to repeat it here, but I have scanned one or two pages (below) just give some idea what I’ve been doing.

In line with the conclusions above, particularly the last one, I wanted to have some themes in mind, some view of my subject, Holmfirth, that I could have as my guiding direction with the assignment.  As a first step, I started to do a mindmap, following anything that came to me in relation to Holmfirth.  This was the result.

I havn’t reproduced it here to be read but just to show that it became quite complex & detailed.  We’ve lived in Holmfirth for more than twenty years, so I feel quite familiar with it, but perhaps too close.  I asked my wife to come up with three or four words that she associated with the town.  She paused for quite some time and then said ‘Hmm, it’s complicated.’  So, given where my mindmap ended up, ‘complicated’ seemed like quite a good place to start.  She then said ‘It’s such an ‘eclectic’ place’ – which gave me a second word.  My conclusion is that representing Holmfirth in a series of images is going to be more about variety and the representation of a number of themes than seeking one overall message (apart from complexity eclecticism!).

This complexity manifests itself, potentially, under a number of headings:

History & Tradition – the town/village has been around for more than 1000 years and has been very much ‘on the map’ since the last quarter of the eighteenth century when industrialisation arrived in a big way.

Change & Variety – the last 100 or so years has seen – textile manufacturing, followed by film production (early silent comedies, for example), postcard design & printing (the comic seaside variety), TV location (Last of the Summer Wine); tourism (largely as a result of the latter); arts and music.

Location – at the end of a steep-sided valley; in a scenic setting; equidistant from three significant conurbations.

People – valley-based, hill-farming families that have been here for hundreds of years; industrial worker families that arrived 200 or so years ago; some ‘moneyed’ families associated with ‘ownership’ of latter; some artistic types; and in ever increasing numbers over the last 20-30 years, commuters/professionals and their families.

To that one can add that it is an exceedingly busy place, rarely quiet, with streams of traffic (including heavy vehicles crossing the Pennines), regular coach loads of visitors, an increasingly popular rock music venue, and some very popular bars & pubs that keep things buzzing into the early hours.  Also, one has to say that it has a ruggedness about it – not necessarily quite the right word, but it certainly isn’t genteel – not the architecture, not the people, not the climate and not the landscape!

Having lived here for 20+ years, I’ve already taken lots of photographs of the place – naturally. I will, of course, be taking fresh images for the assignment, but researching what I’d already done seemed like a sensible starting point.  I’ve been selecting all sorts of ideas and have then pasted them into my notebook, under various headings.  It is, I guess, the equivalent of doing some preliminary drawings before designing something, producing an artwork or whatever.  I’ve scanned and reproduced the pages below – again, not to make them readable here on the blog but to illustrate my approach,

It has certainly been a useful exercise and whilst it hasn’t (and wasn’t intended to) produce all the answers, it has given me some very clear directions I can go, as well as pointing up some obvious gaps (pictures involving people, for example).  I do now have a good idea of how the series of images will be structured, but I’ll post that as a separate item, since this one is getting very long.