Select a broad theme as your individual starting point and research how it is expressed photographically through different genres by different practitioners.

Some examples of broad themes include (but are not limited to):

• The Body
• Identity
• Friendship
• Systems
• Home
• Environment
• Anthropocene
• Power
• The Gaze
• Materiality
• Otherness
• Time
• Family

You can choose one of these, a variation, or something else. Assignment 3 is designed to help by making connections within your analysis.

Response

The broad theme that I have chosen is ‘Communication’, as it is something that I’ve been interested in since Identity and Place. Communication covers a very large area of established norms in the natural world, but in human life it has continued to evolve at pace over the past century or so. What interests me is not so much the methods for communicating a message between people, but how our understanding of visual or symbolic communication has changed with the advances in technology and the impact it has had on our general awareness of what is going on around us. For example, I was in town this week and noticed the increased presence of Union Jack flags hanging from the buildings in the centre. On its own, the flag symbolises the national identity for the UK and stirs many emotions and memories from its use in the sports events such as the Olympic Games to the uniforms of our Armed Services. The current context for its use in Malvern is the upcoming Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. We recognise this without any prompting, because the many methods we use to communicate information tell us that this event, unique in British history, is very soon. The message is reinforced further by the addition of banners and signs in shop windows, but only when we pay attention to them, do they have a conscious effect on us. Subconsciously, we know that there is a celebration coming.

In Assignment 4 of I&P, I paired transcripts of the government COVID briefings with imagery that suggested a contrast between the mood of my town and the messaging coming from our leadership. The briefings were televised, which in itself presented us with a visual communication of how serious the situation was, while trying to reassure the public that those in charge were working the problem.

This still, taken from one of the broadcasts, contains the visual elements we came to expect. The Prime Minister flanked by his scientific experts, standing at lecterns, which themselves are symbols of education or presentation. The setting is grand and important-looking and in the centre are two Union Jack flags, creating a sense of national identity and unity as explained previously. The modern use of a website address completes the message ‘if you are unsure, for any reason, go check the website’. The impact of this visual (even in video) is different from the written words that I included in Assignment 4 as they create more internal context, leaving little to our own interpretation. This is where I am interested in our attention to such communication, how it has changed with technological distraction and the effect it has had on our daily lives.

In exploring this theme, I started to observe examples around me and took a few photographs to start shaping my thoughts.

Research into how my broad theme fits or overlaps into the genres, as well as practitioners can be found in the Padlet linked below:

https://oca.padlet.org/richard5198861/eehevthvdshw2yup

Initial Conclusions

My broad theme is actually vast. Communication is clearly a word that covers many different ways of establishing an understanding between people, whether on a one-to-one basis or as a broadcast. How information is received is as important and as varied because expectation and ideas of truth are influenced my many social factors and personal beliefs. Aside from the physical communication mentioned here, there are cultural understandings that we learn to the extent where concentration on the meaning is negated, such as the Union Jack symbolism.

During a recent cohort call, my peers analysed my three images above using Barrett’s CRIT process. Amongst the feedback was a comment about the deckchairs in the beach shot. They are positioned together and facing the sea, which when we think about it is the usual position for deckchairs when we see them for real or in an image. The communication comes in the form of an invitation to ‘sit, with company and admire the shore’. As well as the work in the Padlet, this feedback led me to think about the participants in a communication series that I might create. Are the messages I want to present between people within the frame (or implied within the frame) or is the viewer part of the message? For example, a still life image representing communication needs the direct engagement with the viewer because it is a relationship between them and the artist. However, in my three images above, the relationships are between the signs and the people within the compositions. I believe the answer to this is not a simple choice of one or the other for a documentary series that merges with the still life and portraiture genres, instead it is a hierarchy of meaning. I need to choose which form of communication, it’s participants and the general idea of what the image means as a priority, letting the viewer look beyond that to the alternative ideas.

This broad theme is going to form the basis of my Self Directed Project in the second half of the course, because I see a number of strong areas for exploration through photographs.

Image Reference

Fig 1. Prime Minister’s statement on coronavirus (COVID-19): 12 March 2020 (s.d.) At: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-statement-on-coronavirus-12-march-2020 (Accessed 25/05/2022).