Feedback

I have received my feedback on my final assignment for Express Your Vision.

Overall pointers were fairly positive; good observations on the annotation of my contact sheets and I showed good visual consistency. I still need to think more on how to communicate more as a whole series rather than individual images. My tutor touched on the fact that I was thinking about what the viewer might think when looking at my images and that his is a good skill to get into as it will help to create that better flowing series overall.

Also, we discussed the way that my series came across as portraiture and the anonymity of a soldier for example, each image was revealing slightly more information each time slowly unravelling and building a picture of who this soldier was that I was trying to create.

Useful feedback to think about putting into reworking the assignment are that the images could even be made even more less revealing and allowing the practical experimenting with interviewing the ex servicemen to guide my practical more.

Potentially, given time I could create two or three series here; one with my husbands military journey, one with the rifleman who was forced out of service through injury and one of the ex cavalrymen who served his fulltime plus extended. This is something I will have a good think about and update in my learning log.

My suggested reading from this assignment is Broomberg & Chanarin – The Day Nobody Died. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are a photographic duo that are believe photographs should be understood and analysed based on emotion, political, cultural and economical factors. They state that “Photographs are a piece of currency that has an afterlife” (Davies, L 2013). In 2008 Broomberg & Chanarin went to Afghanistan but this time, left their cameras at home! Instead they were with 50m long 76cm wide roll of photographic paper. In 7metre intervals the duo exposed the paper to the aghan sun (Seymour, T 2014). This resulted in a 6m long coloured abstract being developed creating their famous “The day nobody died” image. This image which you can see below, is a mixture of streaky browns and reds, blown out whites and dark blacks. The title speaks for itself, in the depths of what was an extremely awful time for the British Army there was this day in particular, the fifth day that nobody was killed. This was uncommon given the days prior and after were filled with multiple soldier deaths (Innes, R 2014). I believe this is in interesting way of documenting war photography but actually a very personal and touching way. Rather than producing images that we can physically and visually see that moment of time this instead documents a more personal concept. The reason that image developed was the Afghanistan sun at those given times during such an event gives it a real sense of being extraordinary.

Davies, L (2013) The new war poets: the photographs of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/9955106/The-new-war-poets-the-photographs-of-Adam-Broomberg-and-Oliver-Chanarin.html (Date accessed: 18/01/2020).

Innes, R (2014) “The Day Nobody Died”, War Photography, and the Violence of the Image. Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 88-99 https://www.jstor.org/stable/43202470?seq=1 (Date accessed: 18/01/2020).

Seymour, T (2014) The DoDo Effect. The British Journal of Photography; London Vol. 161, Iss. 7827. https://search-proquest-com.ucreative.idm.oclc.org/docview/1695233741?pq-origsite=summon (Date accessed: 18/01/2020).