If the above video does not work for any reason, the presentation can be viewed on YouTube via this link: https://youtu.be/RRGlhPCRaNo
Critical Research Journal PHO704
Key Ideas
I’ve written well over 35 blog posts for this module so felt it would be a good idea to signpost some key blog posts that underpin my ideas and research throughout Sustainable Prospects.
In the below link, I have created a contents page of all of the posts created for Sustainable Prospects that also includes notes to summarise content and highlight key themes of research and ideas:
Assignments
Communities and Communication
“Community is a part of the proximate, everyday world, more immediate than the far away society yet larger than the family and primary group, that gives meaning and purpose to one’s life and that also diminishes one’s sense of vulnerability and of being adrift or alone in an anonymous world”
(Keller, 1988: 5).
Community was at the core of my research project. I have since spent time researching the impact of the way that I photograph and now developed an approach into narrative and narrative structure. I started this module reading the work of Ferdinand Tonnies, who defines two key areas of community, that of Gemienschaft and Gesselschaft (Tönnies, 2001). These consider the way that we make our connections through personal, emotional and family (Gemeinschaft), and those formed from the way that we interact and operate within a civil and societal function.
Tonnies Gesselschaft is valuable in linking to the Roland Barthes’ idea of the iddiorryhtmic communities that live together but as an individualistic society (2012). Suzanne Keller uses Tonnies concept to analyse the way that American society has effectively diverged from the personal connections formed in smaller communities:
“the present search for community harks back to the nineteenth century when, in the face of rapid urbanisation, one idea of community was dying and no other had yet emerged to its place. This led human beings to construct an ideal (because lost) past or to design an ideal (because unrealised) future”
(1988: 167)
The idealised community is what interests me the most as there exists a disconnect in the way that we perceive the past, which is usually socially abstract from the realities that they are based on. Both Alec Soth and Eli Durst have used the idea of a perceived community in their work, which also utilises black and white photography as a tool to highlight Keller’s constructed ideal and also the way that photography creates those constructions (Fig: 1&2).
Community Paper Submission
In continuing to develop my research and writing activities and into communityh, I was forwarded an opportunity to submit an abstract to the next ‘Communities and Communication: International Interdisciplinary Conference & Festival’ in April of next year, which would be online via Staffordshire University. I felt that it was a good opportunity to test my research into community and submit an abstract to involve myself in the process of discussing my ideas and work on the topic. Even if this is not successful, I find the process valuable as the act of writing about my project in a concise way really consolidates the way that I have been approaching my project and the research around it.
I will use this to form my contextual statement for my WIPP.
Bibliography
Barthes, R., 2012. How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of some Everyday Spaces. Translation ed. New York: Columbia University Press.
Keller, S., 1988. The American Dream of Community: An unfinished Agenda. Sociological Forum, 3(2), pp. 167-183.
Tönnies, F., 2001. Community and Civil Society. Translation ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Audiences
Who is my work for? At the start of this module, I took a look at some other practitioners to see where they sit on the Art and Commerce spectrum (Fig: 1). It is worth revisiting this now that my WIPP is coming to a conclusion.
My work has steadily evolved from the fairly glossy editorial illustration of text to my current practice. Peers have commented on the poetic nature of my images and Colin has also mentioned the romanticism inherent in the images that I am making. The work is moving more towards a more concept based practice of longer form projects. This evolution of my work creates new opportunities to share it however, it also creates a challenge in navigating a world that I am not used to.
Have aimed to share my work with established publications interested in narrative based photography. A positive outcome from this was through small book publisher, I will be producing a small book based on my images of Watford over the coming weeks with ‘Out of Place Books’ (Fig: 2,3&4). The values of Out of Place really align and resonate with the goals of my work and the narrative journey that I set out to construct in my exploration of place: ‘Out of Place Books’ specialise in “exploring ideas about place; how we understand and experience our environments and how we define them” (Neophytou, 2020). They produce a number of publications about places throughout the year and promote them to an established based of people interested in photography of spaces and learning about environment. This creates a great opportunity to raise my own profile and showcase my current practice to a targeted audience interested in my work.
It also provides a valuable testing bed for future opportunities of ways to promote my work to new audiences through publication. My relationship with the photobook has also evolved during the MA. Initially, I was skeptical of the scope of such books, owing to limited runs and niche demographics willing to consume them. However, I feel that it is important to stop considering the book as an end of itself and more as a means to move on to other ways of disseminating the work. The right photobook creates a platform, a certain gravitas and opportunity use it as a foot in the door to other ways broaden the audience. For example, BBC’s ‘In Pictures’ platform (2020) regularly runs photo images from photographers who have books and exhibitions releasing (Fig: 5). This creates a valuable opportunity to further the reach of a limited audience platform, such as a photobook, by placing in front of a larger media audience online.
Early on in the module, I also discussed the work of Awoiska van der Molen. Her work features regularly in publications and also exhibition (Fig: 6) and is also an area that I could see development towards. Additionally, van der Molen is represented by the Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam (Fig: 7) that provides other avenue for work to be viewed and disseminated. A gallery would also create that kind of gravitas seen from the photobook, to build further audiences and opportunities for maintaining practice. This is an area I would need to investigate further as I am not familiar with the gallery system however, there are clear steps to take before even being considered for such opportunities. My small publication will still be a world away from this kind of profile.
Bibliography
BBC, 2020. In Pictures. [Online] Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in_pictures
[Accessed 3 December 2020].
Neophytou, C., 2020. Out of Place Books. [Online]Available at: https://www.outofplacebooks.com/ [Accessed 03 December 2020].