Summer Show Crit

On our first week we were asked to bring in something we had been working on over the summer, however unfinished it was. Panicking that I hadn't created anything over summer that I considered to be very 'me' I organised a shoot with a friend. This shoot came about much like a typical fashion shoot: mood board, cast, style, shoot, edit. I was excited about the shoot at the time, and even after I'd selected my final edit. However, when it came to putting up work for the summer show it felt wrong to display the work. Instead I showed a series of photographs that I'd shot of my friends and the landscapes in Ibiza this summer. This series more truthfully represented me in that it was showing the viewer what I saw. The work was totally different from the shoot that I had organised, but it had the potential to open up many different pathways to explore. Primarily I am interested in the figure and human behaviour so it made sense to show these photographs that were as much an observation of human behaviour as they were a record of my behaviour.

Planned shoot photos:

Ibiza photos:

The Ibiza photos felt even more special because I thought I had lost the roll of film. I spent two months wondering how I had lost it, until I found it in the back of the camera I shot on. 

The feedback I received surprised me a little. I chose this work to partly to play down my interest in fashion, but still the tutor said it looked very fashion and as though the photographs could be seen in an editorial form. I displayed the photographs in a square (pictured below) with different sections formed by the 'categories' of images. It was suggested that spacing out the categories could have made the piece flow better. Many of the photographs are of my friend Dean, who, as it was hot, was topless in most images, which draws connotations of the female gaze on the male body. Context can change the perception of a body of work dramatically. One of the images of Dean was a soft-focus tight crop if his face as he took a deep breath with his head tilted back. It was pointed out to me that this would fit just fine in an erotic magazine, but in this series the photo didn't come off as erotic at all.

We also discussed the lines that are formed across images by the subject matter, such as telephone wires, cloth, horizons, and that when arranging images it you can line these up to create a more interesting composition.

xox