Introduction

With the completion of Context and Narrative, it was time to reflect on what I had learned, how the coursework and assignments had challenged me and how the learning outcomes had changed my approach to photography. The Conclusion section of the course notes highlighted the following questions that I endeavoured to answer in this essay.

1. Out of all the topics covered in this course, which felt the most comfortable to you and why?
2. Did you discover anything completely new to you and what was it?
3. Which area enabled you to come closest to finding your personal voice?
4. Which area seemed the furthest away from who you want to be as a photographer and why?
5. What were the main things that you learnt? Were there any epiphany moments?
6. Will you return to any of the assignments from this course at a later date? Did you feel like you were on the cusp of anything?

My Reflection

Out of all the topics covered in this course, which felt the most comfortable to you and why?

I would say that the most comfortable I felt was during Assignment 5, for a variety of reasons. The first was that I had shifted my perspective of photography throughout this course from the simple, literal aesthetic to the telling of stories through metaphor and symbolism. By the time I had reached Assignment 5, my thought processes were much more about “what might this mean to the viewer?” and “how does this best represent my intent without signposting the narrative?”. The tools and techniques learned in Part 4 gave me the ability to almost reverse-engineer the interpretation of my idea before actually committing to the context that I was considering for the final image. While this could be interpreted as ‘creativity by numbers’, it actually just gave me some loose structure within which I could create the story of my wife and her ancestors. This structure coupled with the technical aspects of setting up and ‘directing’ the shot, made me feel a sense of comfort throughout the assignment. Of the creative assignments, this was the one that took the shortest amount of procrastination (which I’m known for) in development and experimentation. I believe the outcome was the most powerful photograph that I’ve taken since starting this course, which was borne out by the feedback from my selection of viewers and my tutor.

Did you discover anything completely new to you and what was it?

I think the biggest revelations to me were around the use of self-portraiture to tell stories where the artist isn’t the explicit subject of the photograph. Part 3 was enlightening for a number of reasons, firstly because self-portraiture is a genre of photography that I have avoided to date because it makes me uncomfortable. I’ve never been comfortable in front of the camera because of issues with self image and confidence. When I researched the work of artists like Trish Morrissey and Nikki S Lee, I realised that by placing oneself in an image as part of the context, it’s possible to tell a variety of stories with a much more personal connection to the subject matter. Lee’s series of ‘projects’ where she literally became part of the scene or culture, interested me because she was both present and clearly ‘absent’ as a contextual element in the photographs. She invites the viewer to appreciate the scene from her point of view by almost being a narrator within it. The other work of this kind that I was fascinated by was Morrissey’s Front and Seven Years series where the artist placed herself in other people’s lives and her own family history. The cuckoo nature of Front highlighted the sense of discomfort in disturbing or viewing the personal lives of complete strangers with Morrissey subtly asserting her personality where it didn’t really belong. In seven years, she becomes a chameleon acting a number of parts in her family history with her sister. What struck me about Morrissey’s work was the way that she was not making a statement about herself, which is what I had always previously associated the genre of self-portraiture with. Later in Part 3 we discovered how artists could use other people to say something about themselves and also create a portrait without anyone present at all, e.g. Nigel Shafran’s photographs of his washing up. Instead of explicitly revealing himself, he created his life through the inanimate and seemingly mundane. With these artists and their wildly different work, I gained the confidence to shoot Assignment 3 as a series of self-portraits using my face as a canvass, inspired by Morrissey’s The Failed Realist. This was the most rewarding piece of creative work for me in Context and Narrative as it really pushed me outside of my comfort zone.

Which area enabled you to come closest to finding your personal voice?

I would say that Parts 3 and 4 were those that helped me understand how to speak through photography. Following the very positive feedback on Assignment 3, I started to think about how connections are made between artistic intent and the viewer. In Part 4, we learned the tools that help analyse a photograph, which appealed to the logical, engineering part of my personality. By understanding the way an image could be deconstructed, I was able to think more clearly about how to increase the impact of my own work. For my Asssignment 4, I chose a photograph by Phillip-lorca diCorcia that on the surface contained few obvious contextual elements and had an element of humour within it. Following my analysis I began to appreciate the more sinister suggestions the photograph was making and learned how important it was to include just enough information for the viewer to make up their own mind. When it came to Assignment 5, my idea for the fabricated reality around a very real story, developed quickly. I knew what I wanted to say, so focused on how the viewer might read the image. I think that by putting myself in the place of the viewer, I created a powerful image that has since resonated with everyone who has seen it. This is the closest I have felt to being able to say something and be understood.

Which area seemed the furthest away from who you want to be as a photographer and why?

Ironically, the area of photography that I most related to when I started Context and Narrative is the one that I am least interested in on completing the course. This was the genre of documentary photography. I had always believed that photography was an objective process of representing a subject truthfully before considering the medium as a way of telling a story. The early work in Part 1 described how the use of photography has evolved in the media to tell the story from the perspective of a section of society, religion or political belief. Lange’s famous Migrant Mother for example was from a documentary series being created to highlight the plight of rural people migrating across America following the Great Depression. The publication was telling the story to urban society in a way to get them to relate to the struggle, but this was a very specific narrative being created by the editors. Lange and her colleagues were given a list of subjects and scenarios to shoot for the piece, which I was fairly shocked by. Instead of being an objective medium, we learned that photography was subjective and largely represented the facts that the photographer or their employer wanted. Until that point in the course, I enjoyed going out with my cameras and trying to capture events or natural beauty as I saw them, believing that this was a faithful representation. However, now I’m far less interested in that approach and more keen to use photography to tell a story from my point of view. Perhaps it’s that acceptance of photography as subjective that led me to concentrate more on creating interesting art than documenting what I see around me or perhaps my perspective has been broadened by this course. Either way, I see the possibilities for creativity as far more diverse than when I started Context and Narrative.

What were the main things that you learnt? Were there any epiphany moments?

There have been many learning points during this course, from taking my time to work through an idea to being prepared to take a step back and make significant changes to it. The importance of engaging with people about ideas and getting feedback started with Assignment 2, where I combined descriptions of people’s traumatic experiences with a physical space. After that assignment I had feedback about honing the idea and keeping the relationships between visual and textual context simple, as well as having a structured approach to the practical aspects of shooting a series. Looking for the spaces to fit with the text had been a stressful experience because I had not planned how to conduct the search. Instead, I found myself wandering around my home town (due to COVID restrictions) hoping to be inspired. When I looked at Geolocations by Larson and Shindelman, I could see the structure used for the creative process to take place within. The artists resolved to visit the coordinates of the tweets they had found and once there could create their work; this same process of visiting a specific location, whatever it may contain was something that would have made Assignment 2 much easier for me. I took that idea of a loose structure or plan into Assignment 3, where I had a clear idea from the outset about contrasting emotion and language with the cold, impersonal way that a machine treats words. I had a plan to use the projector, the similar composition from shot to shot and coloured gels on my studio strobes to achieve the background colour. The shoot, although complex in its execution, resulted in a piece of work that I’m very proud of.

The biggest single learning though, came in Assignment 5. I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do, but couldn’t articulate it verbally to my tutor on our call (a technology failure also prevented me from sharing my storyboard). When the feedback was that it was difficult to see how the idea would work in a single image, I had serious doubts about whether I was going in the right direction with my idea. What I learned from this experience was to be prepared to accept feedback that may affect the direction of my ideas, but to have the courage to press on with experimenting to see if they work. The worst that could happen was that something about the image didn’t ultimately work as well as hoped, but as the artist I was likely to recognise this happening and change direction if needed. My final submission was well received and it largely followed my original concept, so I was happy that I’d persevered.

Will you return to any of the assignments from this course at a later date? Did you feel like you were on the cusp of anything?

I will definitely be revisiting Assignments 3 and 5 as there are potentially more powerful series to come from those original ideas. In the case of assignment 3, I am interested in revisiting the way that our lives are lived through our faces. My reluctance to appear in front of the camera is vastly reduced following my original series for that assignment, so I’m excited to explore it further. With the experiences of the pandemic in the past year, I believe there to be many ways of telling stories of how our lives have changed through portraiture. By using self-portraiture, I can put a very personal perspective on those experiences. With Assignment 5, I found the creation and direction of a single image to be hugely rewarding. By taking more of a director role in creating the image, I was able to broaden my perspective on the use of props, light and contrasting juxtaposition. I have just been made redundant from my job and have elected to focus on my studies for this degree, allowing myself to also devote time to personal projects. One of these is to pursue the Associate Member of The Royal Photographic Society (ARPS), something that I’ve always wanted to attempt but had never had time to. The Contemporary genre of that standard is about telling stories through photographs, so I plan to use my work on Assignment 5 as the basis for a panel submission.

Conclusion

Context and Narrative has been a very rewarding course during a year of great uncertainty caused by the global pandemic. At each stage, I have pushed myself further out of my comfort zone with a variety of contexts, including using myself as a subject. I’ve sought feedback from people and taken it on board in order to validate, but also improve the quality of my creative work. I’ve also conducted additional research when pointed towards other artists working in a particular genre, from which I’ve benefitted greatly. I’m looking forward to progressing to the next part of this degree as I feel that I am now beginning to hit my stride.