Which of these projects resonates most with you, and why? The project that resonates most with me is Jodie Taylor’s Memories of Childhood; the reason for this is simply that it is a situation I can relate to. Whilst the few images I was able to view do not directly reflect places from my childhood, they do evoke a feeling of a place and time that I can identify with. Peter Mansell’s My Space, chronicling the impact in his life of his spinal injury and Dewald Botha’s Ring Road, showing his life as an outsider, whilst both interesting show situations … Continue reading Exercise 2.4 – Photographing the unseen (P.68)

Choose a poem that resonates with you then interpret it through photographs. Don’t attempt to describe the poem but instead give a sense of the feeling of the poem and the essence it exudes. I was initially quite daunted by this exercise as my knowledge of poetry is very limited and I also find that I naturally tend to interpret concepts in literal rather than metaphorical terms. Despite this I started looking for a poem that resonated with me. Looking at various poetry sites there are lots of poems about loss, longing and death, however, I wanted to find a … Continue reading Exercise 2.3 – Image and text – Poem (P.60)

Cut out some pictures from a newspaper and write your own captions. • How do the words you put next to the image contextualise/re-contextualise it? • How many meanings can you give to the same picture? Try the same exercise for both anchoring and relaying. In China, they’re closing churches, jailing pastors – and even rewriting scripture This is the original headline from the article which the picture accompanied. Elsewhere in the paper there was a report of the first decline in car sales in China for 20 years. With this in mind I thought the of changing the headline … Continue reading Exercise 2.2 – Image and text (P.55)

Use digital software such as Photoshop to create a composite image which visually appears to be a documentary photograph but which could never actually be. My general approach to manipulating my images is to adjust the exposure, occasionally white balance, sharpening and to crop where necessary. Partly this is because I have little interest in photo-manipulation but mainly because I am not very good at it so this exercise proved somewhat challenging. My idea was to combine the two forms of transport most closely associated with Cambridge, cycles and punts and create an image which showed them parked in the … Continue reading Exercise 1.4 – The manipulated image (P.42)

Read the section entitled ‘The Real and the Digital’ in Wells, Liz. (2009) Photography: A Critical Introduction (4th edition). Abingdon: Routledge, pp.73–75. You’ll find this on the student website. Does digital technology change how we see photography as truth? Consider both sides of the argument and make some notes in your learning log. Wells’ book was published nearly ten years ago and I think that the change in use of digitally imagery since 2009 means that amongst the general population there is a recognition that images that we see in our daily lives, the majority of which will be online, … Continue reading Exercise 1.5 – The manipulated image (P.44)

Look at some more images from this series on the artist’s website. How do Pickering’s images make you feel? Is Public Order an effective use of documentary or is it misleading? We are presented with this image in the course material. At first glance it could be a picture of a street scene shot early in the morning, however, it soon becomes apparent that something is not quite right; the lack of people and vehicles, the traffic lights not working, the windows with curtains seemingly drawn in day light and the strange position of lights in the windows. The notes … Continue reading Exercise 1.3 – Sarah Pickering’s Public Order (P.37)