Assignment 1 Draft

GENRE SHOOT

REFLECTION ON THESE IMAGES AND THEIR INSPIRATION:

These images are first explorations of my subject ancient woodlands as a visual metaphor for my theme of community.

I began shooting with the genre of psychogeography, photographing my longer/wider viewpoint unfocused whilst moving, and stopping to shoot still and with clarity and in detail subjects that caught my eye. In this way I emulated my external and internal passage through the place. I photographed as I saw, in colour. My later shoots continued with a psychogeography backbone but certainly with an increasing less objective sight as I worked into my topic, and I began to genre hop. I was aware that I was also thinking conceptually as I looked.

I was influenced in my way of seeing by practitioners such as Minor White and Stieglitz who used the landscape to express ideas and emotions in a representational way. Contemporary landscape photographers such as Rob Hudson, Stephen Segasby, Guy Dickenson, Tom Wilkinson and JM Golding of the Inside Out collective gave me further inspiration to explore space as an internal and external passage. As I shot, I increasingly found ways to enhance the aspect of community that the subject before me spoke to me of and shot as much what was in my sight as what was in my head.

The images I share here can fall into 3 groups (there are some that overlap):

Psychogeography/drifting
General landscape representation
Abstract representation
Close up representation

From these I can reflect further about my next steps, but at this moment I feel it is towards a mixture of landscape, abstract and close up. I may dabble with constructivism and conceptualism which I will do more research into, but I’m not convinced that I need to go down these routes to say what I want to in my work. I feel I need to work more into photographic styles that I have begun to develop so far in particular, landscape in abstract and close up, and use my absorption and new perspectives to share what I am seeing and feeling.