Reflections on Part 2 of the Course.

When I started this part of the module, I wasn't at all sure about it.  It didn't at first grab my interest and I had difficulty getting my head round the assignment, which seemed challenging to say the least.  As I got into it, though, I became more fascinated.  I have enjoyed looking at the different styles of book cover and I have gained greatly in experience at working with layers and text in Photoshop.  Having selected my book title for the assignment I made a great effort to be more experimental and creative with my photography rather than produce a straightforward landscape image and worked on long exposures to add drama to a landscape and needed to combine two images in Photoshop; again a learning curve.  Along with the projects listed in the course notes, I have enjoyed other research that I have carried out and tried to apply it to my own work.  My tutor picked up on a comment I made about not being attracted by the ugly, when recording my work on an article about Tamas Dezso in The British Journal of Photography.   It reminded him of a saying by Picasso: 'the ugly may be good; the beautiful never will be'.  He feels that something considered beautiful conforms to a standard taste, whereas something considered as ugly may confront our present sensibility and bring out a new one.  Although, as I have said, I am not normally attracted by the ugly, my favoured photographic genre being wildlife and landscape, through discussion with my tutor I have opted for photographing something which may be considered ugly: flotsam and jetsam on the Humber Estuary for Assignment 3.  I hope to show that, as Picasso suggested, the ugly can be good, if not beautiful.  The idea for assignment 3 (initially photographing fly-tipping of rubbish in the countryside; something which incenses me) came from some earlier research I had done on Justin Jin's photography also in the British Journal of Photograph: The Absolute Zone of Discomfort.  Click on the link to see my blog.  I was reminded of this research when I came across an example of fly tipping and added my own images of this to the blog.  Through discussion with my tutor we have settled on a brief for assignment 3 related to this but dealing with the dumping of flotsam and jetsam from ships in the Humber Estuary.  I have also enjoyed the other research that I have done and hope to apply it to my future work.

 My tutor has recommended that, although my reading and research is coming on well, I might like to broaden it with conceptual and historical writing now and again.  He has suggested more from the course reader by Liz Wells and, as well as the essay by Karin Becker, I have already read one by Edward Weston which I still need to blog.  He has also suggested some other books which I shall acquire.

An enjoyable and, I think, successful Part 2 of the course; I now look forward to Part 3 and getting to grips with Assignment 3.