Introduction

Having completed Expressing Your Vision, it was time to reflect on how this course has gone and more importantly what had I learned from it? I’ve said throughout that my comfort zone in photography has always been the technical aspects. When I started this course, I mistakenly thought that there would be more of the technical aspects of taking photographs. My first impression of the coursework was one that I would take through the whole course; one of finding a way to convey meaning in not just one image, but through a series. This was a concept that I was completely unfamiliar with. When I received the feedback on Assignment 5, one of the comments made was about what I would be doing with my photography if I wasn’t doing this course. At the time, I was at a pretty low ebb, considering not continuing with the study because I have a very busy life generally. The suggestions behind the comment was that learning how to make a photograph is one thing, but progressing with it as an art form was something entirely different. The first thing I learned from EYV was that becoming a photographic artist is hard. In my case, with 30 years of engineering behind me and a strong interest in collecting and using film cameras, this was reinforced throughout the year that EYV took to complete.

The course started with the introductory assignment ‘Square Mile’, which I found to be a great introduction to the idea of a collection of photographs that tell as story. Oddly, I didn’t find the task of coming up with a theme all that difficult because I was staying in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales. The beautiful scenery offered a huge variety of subjects concentrated in a small area and because I’ve spent many summers there, it was a square mile that I had a great familiarity with. When I had the feedback from my tutor on the assignment, I was struck by how my imagination had gone a little crazy, the main point being that I could have had multiple themes from my original idea. The concept of less is more is something I have been aware of in my photography before, but only in making a single image, e.g. a landscape with a point of interest in the foreground but without distracting elements in the rest of the frame. Keeping the ‘message’ of the series simple was a new experience for me. Square Mile taught me to think about the subject but also to be wary of diluting the impact of the series by over complicating the theme. I see this pattern of overall restraint in most of the photographers that I’ve studied during EYV.

I progressed to Assignment 2 which presented a new challenge; making the series challenge the viewer to see the connection that unified the photographs and to make them work as a set. My subject was inspired by seeing a film where a particular lighting technique drew attention to the eye area. It wasn’t the light itself that my idea developed from, but the attention to the eyes. I started to research the idea that people can get a sense of someone’s emotions through looking at the eyes rather than the whole face. I found the subject fascinating and ended up with a series that I was very happy with. The feedback on the assignment suggested looking at how actors were lit during the film noire era of cinema, which I duly did. What was a more important comment, though was the need for me to test my images on other people. I had freely admitted that I wasn’t really interested in the EYV email group that I was subscribed to as I didn’t really observe the feedback as all that constructive. However, I started to share my images with a number of people that I trusted to give me an honest appraisal of my work. It could be argued that this was a safe idea for me; that my chosen reviewers knew something about my photography already. I refute this, though as I’m someone who gains benefit from being able to challenge perspectives; I didn’t get the sense that I could readily do this with the EYV group. The feedback was very interesting with it being clear that people saw the obvious and less obvious emotions in the eyes of my subjects. One person found the collection disturbing as I had presented it in its entirety as a 3 x 3 panel of images rather than sequentially. She could see the merits of the collection, but found herself not wanting to study them closely. I was later reminded of this by the comment Nan Goldin made about how we look at things in the social media era; a fleeting glance at Instagram on a mobile phone not being an appreciation of art. I learned from this the value of a variety of viewpoints and, more importantly that it doesn’t matter to me that people like the photographs, just that they react to them.

On to the most challenging assignment of the course, The (in)decisive Moment I found this really difficult as the whole idea of looking and shooting in support of Cartier-Bresson’s iconic concept terrified me. I could have broadened my perspective on it at this point, but it was still fairly early in the course and I hadn’t yet fully appreciated the importance of that. I chose to shoot in support of the decisive moment because it made me uncomfortable and got my inspiration from Martin Parr, a photographer that I greatly admire for his often humourous perspectives on divisive or controversial subjects. I looked for moments where I would wait for some humourous form of partial obscuration before taking the photograph. Suffice to say I made things very difficult for myself as not only do I not feel confident with street-style photography, I had to look for something particular to shoot. The more I looked actively looked for the moment, the more elusive they became. I reached a point where I had 3 images when I needed between 6 and 10 for the submission and all inspiration had abandoned me. My wife took me out for lunch to take my mind off the frustration and I took my camera with me as usual. It was only when I stopped thinking about it, did I start to see moments happening in front of me. I shot another 3 images and submitted them, which was essentially the minimum that I needed. The feedback that I got pretty much echoed that and I elected to respond by continuing to look for subjects whenever I was out with my camera, resulting in 2 more shots added to the collection months later. What I learned here is that the mind works much more effectively when not being put under pressure to perform with frustration preventing any form of creativity in me at least. In conjunction with this, I also learned that a series can always be improved upon even after we think it’s finished. Although OCA made this clear in the guidance about responding to tutor feedback, I didn’t learn this lesson until I saw it for myself. I think I now have 8 really strong images for Assignment 3 which resulted from me walking away and then re-visiting it much later.

Assignment 4 was much more in my comfort zone as it was an exercise more in the technical appreciation of light. I used the opportunity to try to combine both the quality of the image and a theme of revealing details in dark spaces with artificial light. At this point in the course, I realised that all of my work to this point revolved around a theme of ‘revelation’ which I decided to continue with. My images were shot around my home town of Malvern at night and in the main I was happy with them. There weren’t any significant lessons learned as result of this assignment other than the feedback that I needed to flex my creativity muscles when it came to the final assignment of the course, Assignment 5.

Assignment 5 was the completely open-ended brief “Photography is Simple”. Unlike the previous assignments, I settled on portraiture as the theme for my series fairly quickly. It developed further when I combined portraiture with another aspect that I really don’t feel comfortable with, self portraiture. I intensely dislike being photographed and am inherently a very private man so the challenge of making a series about me with revelation as the theme was going to be very difficult.  The feedback from my tutor was that the series was an accomplished from a technical perspective, but fell back on what I was clearly most comfortable with.  He also said that my research was limited to a small number of photographers that I admired, some of whom worked over 50 years ago.   The feedback was fair and I sought to address it with more research into the suggested artists [1] and by re-shooting 3 of the series [2].  The key learning from this assignment was that I should look for inspiration across a genre, not just with artists I like or admire.  It’s as useful to understand why a piece of work provokes a negative response when viewing as that might work well in a different scenario or combined with other elements.  The result of mixing styles can produce a higher level of creativity.  I believe I achieved that with the revised photograph One in Assignment 5.  I mixed the visuals of Hosoe and Woodman to create something that my wife referred to as perhaps the most creative photograph I’d shot to date. I also learned from Assignment 5 something that I’d experienced throughout the course, that it was good to move away from what is comfortable.  Until this assignment, the piece of work I had found most difficult had been Assignment 3 because of my belief that I was somehow intruding when taking photographs of people.  Overall, I was happy with that re-worked collection and delighted with how Assignment 5 turned out.   I’ve changed as a photographer over the duration of Expressing Your Vision and am excited to see where my study takes me next.

References

[1] Fletcher, R, 2019, “Looking at Contemporary Portrait Artists”, blog post, https://wordpress.com/post/richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/1420

[2] Fletcher, R, 2019, “Re-working Assignment 5”, blog post, https://wordpress.com/post/richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/1491