For this exercise I have decided to change the approach given in the course folder and instead of using someone else’s words, I have borrowed someone else’s approach.

In my submission for assignment four I used words written by other people by combining headlines with images. As I am doing this exercise after the assignment, I have decided to explore the approach of Duane Michals that I referenced in my writing for assignment four and whose image There are thing here not seen in this photograph is shown below.

My idea was to add handwritten text to images that give information about the place that is not necessarily evident from the picture. However, after experimenting with handwritten text I decided to add the text to the image when I was editing the pictures as the scans of the printed photographs with text added were of poor quality. Below is one of the scans I decided not to use.

The images were all shot on a weekend in early July in Cambridge, normally the height of the tourist season. However, this year there are very few tourists and I wanted to capture the impact that coronavirus was having on the city.

For this image I wanted the text to provide more information about the weather and the the temperature and to suggest that this was the type of weather when and ice-cream seller would normally be busy, but due to the virus there were few tourists and even fewer customers.

I wanted the text to communicate why the people were standing by this particular stall and also that this was not a random group of people staring, it was in fact a queue.

In this image I wanted the text to give sense of going through the motions. Normally on a warm July day, this part of Cambridge would be full of people wanting to go punting and the ticket-sellers would be busy trying to sign up as many people or parties as possible and would be bragging to their colleagues and competitors about how many bookings they had sold.

For this image I wanted the text to sum up something that was on one hand very unusual and on the other very ordinary, sitting on the grass on a hot day.

To make the text legible the images can be viewed in the gallery below.

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There are two main learnings I’ve taken from this exercise. First, using hand-written text is more complicated than it first appears. If I were to submit physical copies for assessment or display I would have them professionally printed and would have larger borders. I would also need to think about my hand writing, the size and how to ensure if was legible. The second point I have learned is that adding this type of text is more difficult that Michal’s photograph makes it look. For the four images in this series I did have some sort idea of what I was trying to convey when I took the pictures. For the fifth picture I did not have an idea at the time of what message text could add and nor could I think of anything subsequently that would work with the photograph and was in the same style as the other four images, so as a result I used it as the header image