Final Major Project

Assignment Title: Time and Place

Learning Outcomes assessed in this assignment

• Confidently select and utilise equipment, materials and processes appropriate to their career direction.
• Demonstrate creative decision making with the use of confident technical abilities.
• Apply a range of transferable skills including decision making, time management, research, independent working and problem solving.
• Integrate theory, practice and creativity in order to produce work suitable for exhibition.

Task
The work produced for this assignment represents two years of study. Imagery and other material will form the basis for the final exhibition, demonstrating substantial personal direction and refinement of knowledge, craft and professionalism.

You are encouraged to diagnose and negotiate a chosen area of study, both in terms of subject selection, generic foundation and process execution. The increased learning hours of the unit encourage in depth contextual and technical research during the early points of the assignment. Research should cover the identification and exploration of influences. Secondly, process and production factors can be explored and refined, adding support to the ethos of the unit as a conclusive phase of work.

The function of the exhibition for Foundation Degree students is primarily to provide a showcase for two years of specialist study and to provide a chance to market your achievements to friends, family, peers and most importantly industrial contacts. Secondly, the ethos, concepts and craft surrounding the exhibition process are an essential experience for graduate photographers and image makers, with many transferable skills being carried over into their working careers. Finally, the exhibition provides an excellent opportunity for the community to become  involved with the programme and its work. The local community will assist the students with the provision of much of the subject matter needed for the programme so it is logical that the community should be given the opportunity to share in the work.

Information, skills and techniques acquired from the Work Based Learning experience should also be visible in the final work.

Devise, plan an 'in depth' photographic assignment that illustrates the following:

1. Your specialist direction
2. A complete range of your technical skills
3. Skill level
4. Creative flair
5. Organisational and research competence

Present a typed rationale for your assignment that outlines the nature and planned content of your work by Friday 14th February 2014. Send this to your course tutors as a PDF document. This will form the starting point for your negotiated assignment.

The theme for this brief is 'Time and Place'.

You may then commence with your work, which will involve the production of a major piece of photography that will form the basis for your graduate exhibition. The exact specification of your work will be agreed with your tutor.

Assessment criteria

• Confident utilisation and appropriateness of materials, techniques and processes.
• Creativity and confidence in decision making.
• Evidence of selection of specialist direction.
• Evidence of transferable skills including time management, research, independence, teamwork and problem solving.
• Quality of exhibition.

______________________________________________________________

My Proposal: Nostalgia and atmosphere in architecture

After research and considering different paths to take, I have decided to focus my Final Major Project on places in an architectural and archaeological sense. Rather than a specific method or technique, this whole project will be inspired and fuelled by my interest in and tendencies of making observations and in a sense, forever holding onto the past.

nostalgia

nɒˈstaldʒə/

noun

noun: nostalgia; plural noun: nostalgias

1. a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past.

   "I was overcome with acute nostalgia for my days at university"

   synonyms:

   wistfulness, longing/yearning/pining for the past, regret, regretfulness,reminiscence, remembrance, recollection, homesickness, sentimentality

   • something done or presented in order to evoke feelings of nostalgia.

     "an evening of TV nostalgia"

I am someone who is very nostalgic and always looking back, whether it be on old photos, revisiting or wanting to revisit the same places as childhood, not liking modern decor and always preferring traditional and old buildings, or still listening to the same music as I did growing up and also from previous decades, being one of those people who say that 'things aren't what they used to be'.
     My primary interest usually lies in taking portraits, wanting my photographs to reflect my interest in reading human subjects and capturing their emotions, so I stumbled on the beauty of photographing buildings, by accident. I was photographing a dress rehearsal for a dance school show, when during a break I was wandering around the building, camera in hand. The building was a Parish Hall in Wigan, home to what could be the oldest amateur dramatics society in the world, formed in circa 1830. I became fixated with the decor and look of the whole building as I walked from room to room, quickly making observations and taking photographs as I went, being taken back to when I used to go to drama group in a local theatre during childhood. I realised how much feeling nostalgia can be an experience for all senses. For example, the smell of cigars and sickly sweet floral perfume taking you back to visiting your grandparent's house, hearing a slang or regional word or song you had almost forgotten, the taste of a comfort meal from childhood and perhaps the most obvious, looking back on old photographs. 
     This day of shooting marked a change in my approach to my Final Major Project, showing how a project can organically develop and change direction. I want to create a series of images that explore my own and everyone else's nostalgia, that allow the viewer to feel and see atmosphere and time through a static image. I also intend for the project and subsequent images to be more focused on the concept and feelings associated with the content of the images, than of the technical ability involved in making the image. This being said, I am still expecting to consciously and unconsciously follow compositional considerations to compose my images, such as rule of thirds, viewpoint and symmetry.

Research & sources of inspiration

Project: 'Dear Photograph'

Dear Photograph is a simple concept, to 'take a picture of of a picture from the past in the present'. It was started by Taylor Jones and unexpectedly became a photographic movement that thousands of people around the world now join in with. Having done my own set of images three years ago for Dear Photograph, I found the experience very therapeutic and compelling to revisit old places and memories, especially when seeing the the finished image, a juxtaposition of then and now.

My journey began on May 25th, 2011, while sitting at the dinner table looking through old photographs that my mom had carefully placed in countless albums and suddenly I was struck by a familiar scene. I picked up a photograph of my younger brother, grinning from ear to ear over his Winnie the Pooh birthday cake, from years gone by. I looked at my brother Landon sitting across from me where he was sitting in the exact same chair. I took the photograph out of the album and began to move my arm in front of me lining up the past picture of Landon with the present and in a slow motion moment that light bulb of an idea came to me. I ran for my camera and took a picture of the picture from the past in the present. I began running around the house with various photos in hand snapping picture after picture capturing the scene that was throwing everything back in time. I ran to my computer to upload them to Tumblr.

Tumblr asked me for a caption, and I wondered, if my brother could talk to his picture what would he say to that little guy way back then? I typed out the salutation "Dear Photograph, I wish I had as much swag then as I do now" Landon. I posted it along with 5 other photos. Each caption expressed my desire to reconnect with my past by taking me back in time and allowing me to relive the memory even if it was for only one brief moment.

Suddenly people from around the world began submitting their photos and personal stories. The site was growing exponentially every day, 16 hits to 100 to 3,000 and then a quarter of a million hits from Reddit. Mashable picked up Dear Photograph and my idea began to create unbelievable buzz among media outlets around the world.

Dear Photograph inspires visitors to dig through their shoe boxes full of photos and create new memories and experiences from a time already lived. Via the website, people can offer support, advice, prayers, or simply good wishes to fellow users who share the personal stories of their photographs.

Dear Photograph has allowed me a glimpse inside other people's lives and enabled me to learn from their life lessons. It is humbling to say the least. My own life experience has been very limited as I am young and for that I am really grateful. Perhaps we all share the same secret wish to slow down and turn back time, even if it just for a little bit. Maybe recapturing the past helps us not to forget how we want to live right now and embrace those around us today and tomorrow. Because after all, like the flash of a camera... suddenly we aren't here anymore.

 www.dearphotograph.com

Workshop: 'Aesthetics of nostalgia'
Whilst researching into the place/importance that nostalgia holds within photography, I came across this workshop held by Aaron Schuman from 17-18th April 2010. The brief was for participants to create photographic work that consciously deals with concepts of nostalgia and photography's unique relationship to it; the idea was, carefully avoiding overt irony, over-sentimentalisation or imitations of 'retro', to genuinely engage with this oddly powerful human emotion through the photographic image. The workshop came with various photographers and artists who could be inspiring in the creation of work to fit this brief. Below are the artists I found inspiration in for my own project:

http://www.issp.lv/en/workshops/aesthetics-of-nostalgia

Artist: Lee Friedlander

• American photographer, born in 1934
• Began photographing the American social landscape, 1948
• "With an ability to organise a vast amount of visual information in dynamic compositions, Friedlander has made humorous and poignant images among the chaos of city life, dense landscape and countless other subjects."
• http://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/lee-friedlander

Artist: Jitka Hanzlova

• Has produced work based on her childhood village of Rokytnik, Czech Republic 
• Her work is imbued with a sense of wistfulness, stemming from her awareness of the atmospheric effects of light, her isolated framing of her subjects, and her strong sense of history.
• https://artsy.net/artist/jitka-hanzlova

Artist: Todd Hido

• American contemporary artist and photographer (born 1968)
• Much of his work involves urban and suburban housing across the U.S
• Produces fantastic images full of engaging ambiguity
• Captures houses without human subjects - occupied and unoccupied, night and day which shows a difference in atmosphere and incredible eye for lighting
• Influences are Alfred Hitchcock, Edward Hopper, Stephen Shore, Robert Adams, Walker Evans, Nan Goldin, Emmet Gowin, Larry Sultan, Alfred Steiglitz, Andreas Gursky and Rineke Dijkstra
• I find this work hugely inspiring for the kind of images I want to produce by the end of the project
• http://www.toddhido.com/

Artist: Stephen Shore

• American photographer, born in 1947
• Known for images of banal scenes and objects in the United States
• Also known for his pioneering use of colour in art photography
• http://stephenshore.net/

Artist: Larry Sultan

• American photographer (1946-2009)
• best known for his 1977 collection of found photos called "Evidence", which the New York Times characterised as "a watershed in the history of art photography."
• Also created a poignant series of images, '"Pictures from Home"
• www.http://larrysultan.com/

 "What can we tell from the picture? In that sense, I think finding that room to make pictures that don't jump off the wall as, or detonate as dramatic, either in lighting or in form or in composition or in subject matter, but more ordinary, that's the challenge."

List of places
For this project, I compiled a list of nostalgic and atmospheric places I have and haven't been before, but a discovery I have made is that a lot of buildings have been taken down or are a lot more inaccessible than they once were. This discovery was a sad yet sobering one, reinforcing the inevitability of progress, that things are changing all the time for good or bad.

My photographs

St Josephs Parish Hall:

Engineering mill/warehouse:

Corporation Park:

Chapel:

Miscellaneous places:

Thwaites Theatre:

Paper choice

I chose this paper above standard matte as I noted the thickness, heaviness and rough-like quality and thought the 'imperfect' finish would pair well with my unpolished photographic journey of nostalgia. I say this because a lot of the buildings and places I photographed and chose to include in my final images are full of character, unapologetically genuine, retaining decor and atmosphere over decades. Although I am not full of knowledge of paper types and qualities, it was a really good experience to be able to choose a specific paper that goes hand in hand with my subject.

Chosen final images

This image was taken at St. Joseph’s Hall in Leigh and was a large part of my changing of paths in this project. The room is a long-serving changing room for what is believed to be the oldest amateur dramatics society in the world, formed in 1830. As someone who used to go to my local theatre every Sunday for drama group, I can closely relate to the building and its features as it takes all of my senses back to those years ago. I now know the numbers allocated to each hanger are raffle tickets, showing its age and how many people must have been here through the years.

These images were taken at a gears and engineering warehouse in Darwen with over 25 years experience in the industry. I chose them as my finals because here everything seemed to radiate traditional, northern, working-class, men at work values.  These images were taken at night after the workers had gone but a definitive atmosphere remained, with objects how they left them from their working day. I am reminded of the Industrial Revolution and how physical, manual jobs like these are not seen as the norm like they were some years ago, many people going straight from school to college, college to university and university to an office setting.

This image was taken at Corporation Park’s Conservatory – a Victorian cast iron Grade II listed building. The conservatory was completed in 1900 and opened in 1902, but has been boarded up and inaccessible for years now, resulting in the plants and trees taking control and filling most of the space, even growing up to the glass ceiling. Although now inaccessible and very unkempt, rusty and with broken windows, I found this to make it an even more charming and intriguing place, full of colour and predominantly ambiguity to someone who hasn’t been in before and is looking in and photographing from the outside. The contrast between the pure white paint, vibrant green of nature and browns and oranges of neglect appear to tell a story through a single frame.

These images were taken at Hindley Unitarian Chapel, Wigan. Built in 1700, the Chapel stands in a Liberal Christian tradition, which also values and draws upon the streams of spirituality from the various world religions. Various groups, including weekly spiritual groups and my sister’s dance school, also use the building. Walking around the rooms, much of the décor and furniture looks like it has remained untouched or unchanged for years and there is a real atmosphere through the entire building, sometimes notably chilling. As some rooms are seldom occupied, I discovered that this vacancy hugely affects the atmosphere into something a lot different from standing in a modern room with people around. I found that looking at block colours and lines in my surroundings very much a theme when framing these minimalist shots.                                                     

The last place I photographed was Thwaites Theatre in Ewood, Blackburn. I felt this rounded off my short journey of nostalgia as the first place I visited, St. Joseph’s Parish Hall, reminded me of Thwaites Theatre as I used to come a lot during childhood – every Sunday for drama club, seeing the Christmas pantomimes with primary school, seeing my twin sister enter talent competitions and watch my older sister when she made it into a couple of pantomimes herself. The building itself began as a cinema in 1948, until it opened its doors in 2002 as Thwaites Empire Theatre. Over the years, it has been known as the Electic Light Theatre, the Barn, the Empire, the Red Brick, the Thwaites Theatre and now, finally, the Thwaites Empire Theatre. Again, I found myself looking for strong or contrasting colours, lines and negative space to frame the images.