Introduction

This post is essentially a restructure of my thoughts and comments made immediately after I received the tutor feedback.  In preparation for assessment, I’ve further expanded my reflection on this assignment, considering some of the areas where it could have been enhanced or developed further.  This includes any additional research carried out and any re-working that I have done to improve the way the photographs meet the original brief.  The overall learning points are also summarised in my final post “Reflecting on Expressing Your Vision” which can be found in my Learning Log.

Initial Response to Feedback (from the original blog post)

I’ve received my tutor’s feedback for this assignment recently.  It was very positive about my approach to my collection, starting with my initial inspiration and progressing through my research.  The variety of my research including Plutchik’s work on visualisation of emotions was highlighted in the feedback as well as the breadth of research into the painters.

The areas that were suggested to progress the assignment revolved around viewer response.  Although my tutor stated that the images worked as a set, he suggested that feedback from others would give me sense of whether I had achieved what I set out to.   I have since asked a number of people to read this blog post and they all confirm that what I described as my idea, works in the photographs.

I had another suggestion from my tutor to look more closely at the lighting effect used in the film that inspired me at the beginning.  The use of the technique was used in early cinema to increase the mystery of the character.

On the whole, I’m very happy with how this assignment went and the reaction of everyone that has read the blog post so far.

Expanding my Review (January 2020)

In the 12 or so months since I submitted this assignment to my tutor, I have been testing how people have reacted to it as suggested in the feedback.  The first decision I made in presenting the work to people was to to continue with the ‘grid of 9’ format.  This came from a period where I reflected on each image as part of a series.  My conclusion from that review was that each image does have impact in its own right, but the cumulative effect of showing them all at once is far stronger.  In the grid we see the differences in emotions from each model, as well as common groups of expressions that could create similar viewer perspectives across the different models.  When I recall the studio time, I remember how each model sat for the shoot and as the conversation flowed, their emotions changed with each topic.  I feel this is much more strongly represented when the images are shown as a grid as we can almost see this evolution across them.

I then began to show the work to a number of people who had some interest in art, whether as a photographer or painter.  The first reaction was from a fellow photographer with whom I had discussed the idea for this assignment before shooting it. His reaction was largely technical and while he appreciated the shoot maintaining the same lighting and broad composition, he was disappointed that I had limited my attention to the eyes only.  His understanding of my idea was more around the power of eye expression within the context of the rest of the face.  Although he accepted that he had perhaps misunderstood my idea, he didn’t believe that the series worked.  I tried to get him to be more specific about his criticism, but he wasn’t comfortable doing so.   This was a learning point for me as I realised at that moment that I was looking for people to ‘like’ my work.   The fact that we are friends meant that he wasn’t really prepared to explain why he didn’t for fear of offending me.

The next few critics of the work were much more appreciative of the way the images worked in the set.  One piece of feedback was that one could look at them for a long time before forming a confident view of which emotions were being revealed.  Also, taking time to review them together revealed the connections between the way they were arranged as I mentioned previously.  One person suggested that the symmetry of the compositions was almost like that of a flag.

A discussion with a local painter was different again.  She stated categorically that she didn’t like the work as it made her feel uncomfortable.  She appreciated what I was saying with the piece, but felt that she didn’t really want to look at it for any length of time.  I wondered if this was more about human contact than looking at a photograph, and after some research concluded that her reaction may have been about making eye contact.  There are many studies about why people struggle to make eye contact apart from the problems suffered by autistic children that I mentioned  in the original assignment post.  People believe that they are being penetrated by the viewer’s gaze, whether it is welcome or not.  An article in business magazine Inc [1] described this as:

Direct eye contact opens a door to the person inside you, without your permission. The less authentic you are — and the more you worry about being judged, the more the more uncomfortable this feels. If you overcome this by over-compensating, you could lose trust.  [1]

While I don’t believe that my friend has a problem with authenticity, I would describe her as very private, so it made sense that she might have felt that the eyes were looking at her from the picture.  What I also learned from this feedback was that I shouldn’t be looking for people to like my work, but to have some form of reaction or experience by viewing it.  I pointed out to her that I really didn’t mind that she had reacted that way.

The final feedback I received was when the images were being mounted for assessment. The picture framer and I were discussing the distances between the photographs in the multi-aperture mount that they would be presented in.  Her view was that they needed to be seen without the viewer having to actively look around the frame.  Instead, there should be an initial viewpoint from which the viewer can then look more closely at each image in the set.  I was reminded of Exercise 1.4 – Frame earlier in the course where we had to place our subject at a specific position in the frame.  Only afterwards were we to consider the rest of the space.  That exercise was the inspiration for my presenting the photographs together, so I felt that this feedback supported my original intention.

Overall, I was very happy with this set and elected not to re-shoot any of the images.

References

[1] Storoni, M, 2017, “If You Don’t Know Why Eye Contact Makes You Uncomfortable, This Is It”, Inc.com, https://www.inc.com/mithu-storoni/the-powerful-reason-youre-so-afraid-of-looking-int.html