Demonstration of technical and visual skills

Materials

• I have not printed any of the images but will do so and these will be given to the subjects in the photographs should they want copies. As assessment for this course will be digital only I will not be producing prints of the images and text combined.

Techniques

• Drawing on my experience of using flash in assignment two, I used a variety of flash techiques when shooting the series. In the image Elsie I used a flash shot through an 80 cm soft box placed to the sitter’s right to provide the light source in a dark cramped room. In the image Evie I used flash bounced off the wall opposite the sitter to provide fill-in flash to counteract the light coming in from the window behind the sitter. Finally, in the image Emma I used direct fill-in flash to counteract the effect of the awning above the sitter.
• An element that I deliberately tried to work on with this assignment was engaging with the subject whilst photographing them. I realised in assignment two that I did not give the subjects sufficient direction and I made a conscious effort to explain before I started shooting what I was trying to achieve and more importantly, contintued to talk to them as I shot. This was not wholly successful, but I do feel that I engaged more than previously.

Visual awareness, design and compositional skills

• Before I started shooting I knew that I wanted to present the final images in colour as I thought that would provide the maximum amount of information about the subjects to the viewer. I decided that I would position the figures fairly centrally in the frame and although I wanted the images to provide background as context, I also wanted to ensure that the figures occupied a large part of the frame and that the images were portraits rather than figures in a landscape. The final decsion I made was to shoot at apertures of around f2.0 – 2.8 as I wanted the background to be out of focus but not so much that it would be unrecognisable.

Quality of outcome

Content, application of knowledge, presentation of work in a coherent manner, with discernment

• I am pleased with the series overall and I enjoyed the process of collaborating with members of my family to create the work.
• I think the work draws upon my experience from assignment four and also looking at how photographers have combined images and text. I think Jim Goldberg, Duane Michals and Anna Fox’s work have shown me how text can be used with an image to give greater or different meanings and this is something I had not previously considered.
• I spent some time thinking about how to present the work and I was particularly conscious that I wanted the images and the text to have equal representation. I considered displaying the series as an online photo book and that is where the idea of a double-page spread originated. In the end I decided to display the series in a gellery as the quality of the images in the photo book were poor. I spent some time working out how to create new files containing the images and the text side by side and also trying to ensure the images and text were positioned properly. I also spend some time looking at various font styles and colour before settling on Courier in a medium/dark grey.

Demonstration of creativity

Imagination, experimenation, invention, personal voice

• I do not think the work is imaginative but it is the first time I have experimented with encouraging the people being photographed to contribute to the work, both in terms of them having input into the location of where their pictures were taken and also contributing the text describing who they were.
• Whilst I do not feel the work is inventive, I do feel it an element of a personal voice, both in the people I photographed and my overall approach.

Context

Reflection, research

• I think the series draws on the work of several of the photographers whose I’ve researched during the course, most notably Jim Goldberg’s series Rich and Poor series, the work of August Sander and Anna Fox’s work My mother’s cupboards and my father’s words which combined her images with text from another family member.