Stage 2 Evaluation and Reflection

Throughout stage 2 of the foundation course I have begun to learn and develop a variety of skills and techniques, linked to a specific art subject e.g. photography. The photography pathway has expanded my knowledge and has opened up to a range of new theoretical approaches linked to my projects.

The first project was on documentary photography. I had to take a series of photographs to document an activity. I chose to document young drivers in Dorset because it’s a popular activity that links closely to students. I decided to take a variety of portraits of the young drivers with their car and then just close ups of them on their own. This idea was influenced by Spencer Murphy’s project ‘Urban Dirt Bikers’, which shows portraits of a biking community with and without their motor bikes. I really liked this approach Spencer took to document a biking community. The portraits with their bikes convey their social aspects. The close up photographs convey the biker’s emotional qualities and their truthful personality. Overall, I feel that this project went well and showed young drivers in a new light that might not be considered in the outside world. I think that I learnt a lot about what I should consider when photographing people in an outside environment. An improvement, if I were to do this project again would be to create a detailed plan of what I am going to capture in each shoot, to create consistency across the models.

The next project was Narrative photography. I wasn’t really sure where to start, but I did decide that I wanted my photographs to be of a high contrast black and white. This gave me a starting point to research into high contrast photography, which is where I discovered the genre of Film Noir. Film Noir is a technique that is used to create black and white, high contrast murder mystery or crime films. I was interested in creating a Cluedo murder mystery narrative because of the way unanswered questions can be left for the viewers to guess. Overall, I feel that this project went well because of the lighting used, which vividly created the film noir effect. Also by adding subtle colours on top of each photograph gave a striking atmosphere for the viewers to identify the Cluedo characters.

The last task was the portraiture project. I chose to photograph portraits of a group of people, to show the different people that take part in the same activity. I chose to photograph an amateur dramatic group because I felt like this would be a great way of showing different personal qualities of actors. My first idea was to capture two photographs of each actor, one photo being natural and the other one showing performance. It showed two different qualities of the same person and the concept of how an actor transforms. However, I felt that the images from this shoot were slightly out of focus because of the movement made when the actors were performing. To improve this I talked to my tutor and decided to just capture natural photographs of the actors because there wasn’t much difference between the natural and acting images. The location lighting kit worked well because it gave a striking spot light effect that creates the idea of performance on stage, as well as depth within the shot. However, an improvement that I would make would be to consider a flash light because it would create more of a direct light or spot light.

Overall I feel that my strongest project was portraiture because it shows an amateur dramatic group in a different way that wouldn’t be shown when they are performing. I really enjoyed developing this project because I felt that there were different approaches to experiment with and explore throughout the project time. I have begun to think about what theme I would like to base my final major project on, that will be broad enough to work with. My portraiture project was said to be very English and I feel that I can explore this theme because there is a lot to think about when it comes to English culture.