Not strictly year two for me, more year 4. I’m currently studying part time at the University Of Wolverhampton for a BSc In Photography.
As a result of it being a part time course, each of the three years are split in half thus creating a six year course. This year has been my fourth, is my second half of level five and next year I begin the level Six study.
Any text underlined and coloured blue is a hyperlink and will take you to a blog post of the event being mentioned .
Black Country Boy
This academic year has seen me and my new group (my previous group moved to Level 6) take on two briefs. One of which was to produce some work for an exhibition titled “The Matter Of The Black Country”
Not having had any experience of the Black Country (BC) ever it was a bit of a learning exercise, trying to find out where the Black Country is for a start, nobody can ever give a consistent answer. I brainstormed and went down two routes, the first being concrete buildings in Dudley Zoo and the second being street photography of people and shops int eh many town centres around the BC.
Having never been to Dudley before I found myself drawn to this part of the BC, almost everyone agreed Dudley ws in the BC so I felt I was on safe ground. I took my camera to the town and wandered around several times before noticing that the Zoo had some great concrete waves on the roof of the original entrance. There was also a wonderful old Odeon cinema opposite that now houses the Jehovas Witness Kingdom Hall.
I went down a rabbit hole looking into the old cinema, finding out that it was designed by the same people who built the Odeon in Wolverhampton at the same sort of time also. I carried on into the vortex of concrete design and penguin pools of the Tecton Architecture Group, with Berthold Lubetkin as the chief designer of the Dudley Zoo enclosures back in the 1930s. Its almost a century ago and the buildings still stand the test of time.
I struggled to be focussed on the architecture a couple of times and found some wonderful looking creatures in the cages but on the whole my cameras were pointed at the waves and angles of the concrete structures. Reading up on the design of these buildings gave me an understanding of how the architect was trying to tie in together all of the newer concrete structures in the shadow of the Dudley Castle. He was being sympathetic to the needs of the animals, the landscape and the people who would visit, as it turns out it used to serve millions per year back in its heyday.
Several visits with different cameras and film stocks resulted in my favourite images, captured through my Bronica ETRS with Lomography Redscale film. This wasn’t a straightforward shoot though, I had to repeat the shoot after the first set of redscales were vastly underexposed. Following all of the advice on the internet can sometimes lead to issues. This time I was shooting at box speed but it was woeful, then I tried it two stops compensated on the last set of three films and they came out marvellously.
Whilst still visiting the zoo regularly, I was also paying attention to Halesowen, West Brom, Wolverhampton, parts of Birmingham to see if there was anything else tickling my fancy. I was most happy with a photo of the large Bond Wolfe tower building in West Brom with a flight of pigeons in front of it, but I also discovered some other lovely sights in each of these different places. Underground garages, old Insurance Company buildings and many shots of small details around these towns helped me fill up my catalog, but I was still finding the zoo photos most intriguing.
Once I’d cut it fine by getting the better set of frames back from the developer with a bit of a delay, I was able to scan them and then work with Jim in the print support hub to create three large images that I would mount on the wall in the Central exhibition.
The opening of the exhibition was a fun event too, with lots of Black Country related food and themed music available. It was a proper exhibition and didn’t feel like the smaller exhibition we’d produced at the Eagle Works the year before. I was happy with my choice of images, although some of them were physically smaller than others, I also helped hang the majority of images down the one side of the gallery along with Brian. I think in hindsight I should have stepped back and let some of the youngsters have a go, so they can garner some experience in the process.
There were a number of people there and I spoke to a few who were complimentary about my work and I was very grateful. Imposter syndrome at these type of events is more difficult to deal with than when Im in a room of other artists and people I know. The exhibition stayed up for a few days and then it was time to remove and take bak the works. I used my vehicle to transport many of the works back to the uni and from here they were offloaded. I kept mine with me though as I was going to use them in the VAN Artist’s board, see this post.
The whole experience of the exhibition was a positive one, the set up the ordering of the images the mounting and the hanging, followed by being there to present and answer any questions. I also sold a single print of the Wave photo. The buyer was talking to me about getting in touch with architects locally who might want some photos of their projects that do not fit the norm of front on elevation images.
I was happy with my work on this project and I did much research on the architects responsible for the architecture documented and then of other architectural photographers such as Morley Von Sternberg , Alexander Clement , and Lucien Herve who all provide photos for books about architecture and often win awards for their images. It was interesting to see the wide variety of images that they produce and how good quality it is. As a result of this research I bought a second hand Tilt Shift lens for a journey to the Brunel University campus to capture some corrected vertical shots of the very famous old modernist buildings.
BIMM x WLV Collab
With the exhibition completed and taken down it was time to crack on with the second semester and the brief that would see us students collaborate with musical performing students from the BIMM University in Birmingham. Four shoots in total with the band at various locations gave me a set of final images for the submission that I’ve just dropped into the Canvas tool today.
We were to produce images of a rehearsal or behind the scenes, then a full photo stuidio shoot and lastly a live gig shoot too. I was reasonably happy with the shoots except the Studio shoot whihc I was sweating about and struggling to maintain my composure to look professional and like I knew what I was doing.
The shoots with the band are all documented in the blog (One, Two, Three, Four) so I won’t go into them too much more. Suffice to say that I was happy with the small number of what I considered to be usable photos from these shoots. Looking back at the images now and I can see some merit in images I marked as 1 star at the time. A one star in Lightroom means that I don’t want it but don’t want to delete it yet. I’ve often found that in the past, photos initially discarded can come to mean something and have a significance that works well. Whether it’s due to the content of the single frame and the subject or whether it may fit into a sequence or series well to give a full picture of a shoot.
The communications with the band were excellent also and the organisation between Brian, myself and the group enabled some swift organisation of getting to where we needed to be at the correct time (most of the time). They were professional and Brian and I were also. We also used social media, mainly Instagram to share the photos that we had taken, with me choosing to share only two or three in total initially. My thought was that the band might like to control their media feed rather than having random images coming from me and making their image/aesthetic look different to their brand image.
I did communicate with them and got some more photos out that they were ok with onto Instagram and a couple on Facebook too. The images I selected were carefully considered as I wanted to cause no detrimental impact to their carefully cultivated identity.
I also released a few shots from the BIMM Live gig which had a few people engaging with them, I didn’t feel the need to cede the control in this occasion as the artists were all on the same stage and it would be the same as at any other gig. Anyone might be photographing and publishing, so I didn’t feel the same obligations on this point.
With all the shoots done, and the editing underway I remembered why I did not like editing in Photoshop too much. The amount of time, focus and energy on removing the smallest of blemishes from the floor, wall or even faces etc just ate up too much time. The tools are easy enough to use in Photoshop and when I do some measured editing I think it looks ok, more often than not though I may edit too heavily leaving obvious traces. The output images were ok and stand up well to scrutiny but I also felt a little disingenuous when removing the joints in the wall or the other things like cables. I know it improves the final image, and this can be done in the darkroom so its not a big change from Film or anything, but I wish I had tidied up the scene before the shoot. A paint of the floor and walls and perhaps some masking tape over the joins would have made it an easier shoot, in post production.
It was a great experience being able to work with a band from the concepts and through to the production of the images that they want. Like i’ve previously mentioned, it’s not normally in my wheelhouse to do studio photography but it was definitely an experience that I learned a great deal from. It allowed me to use some of my off camera creativity to create the scene and plan different shoots that might have been possible had the band had more time also.
The experience picked up also includes the editing that I carried out in Lightroom and also Photoshop in the post production of these images.
The development and processing of films is a skill that I learnt in the first three years at the uni so I was pretty comfortable with this year, but I was able to learn more about the scanning using the Epson scanners in the studio area. I used these to scan my negs for the Black Country project and also for a few frames of 35mm that I shot the band with.
I carried out some printing in both the B&W and Colour darkrooms with different paper and some challenging characteristics of tired chemistry. I processed a colour film in the Cinestill kit this year, which I’d never done before so that is also another stretch goal that I’ve achieved.
Extra Curricular Activity
Outside of the curriculum I’ve attended a few different events. The first of which was a talk that I gave to the Bingley Camera Club in October about my photographic practice and concrete buildings. This was certainly a challenge.
We had a visit from Tom Hicks at one point too to discuss the Black Country project which I found helpful and very worthwhile.
Tom also visited again for an interesting conversation with Richard Billingham, the photographer behind Rays A Laugh. They discussed the photography that Billingham practiced and how it came out of a different place in art school. He also shared with us the title of a film that I subsequently watched called Ray & Liz, based on some of his experiences growing up. It’s a bit depressive and brutal in a couple of places but ultimately relatable.
A talk in January between Euripides and Oliver Chanarin at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery where we learnt more about his practice and the artwork that was installed in the gallery.
An RPS Symposium for the Historical Section was held at the uni on a Saturday and that was full of many different historical references to photography, some of which can be seen in this post. It was very enlightening and strange at the same time. Post Mortem photography will take a while to leave my brain…
In December I also attended a two day Street Photography Workshop with Matt Stuart in London, whre we had different targets to meet in order to provide a set of photos for a review the next day. It was very interesting and meeting photographers from all around the world helped me further with my imposter syndrome.
I attended the Photography Show in March at Excel London too, and attended a few talks from experts about night time astrophotography, youtube use for marketing, photo editing and even an exploration of 15 years of drone photography.
In April my wife and I went to Venice for the first time, amongst all of the wonderful places there are in the beautiful city, we visited a Richard Mapplethorpe exhibition, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and also the Leonardo Da Vinci Museum. The portraits that Mapplethorpe made are superb and I was initially under the impression that he spent most of his career doing things on film that you wouldn’t show your granny. Hi sattention to detail in some of the images of bodies, their make up, muscles and structure highlight the fact that he might well have been a sculptor if he hadn’t been a photographer. His work with some of his muses is a whole world away from my expectations of when I went into the exhibition.
The Peggy Guggenheim collection held some wonderful pieces of art in the building and courtyard, with Mondrian, Magritte, Dali, Pollock, Kapoor and many more it was an impressive collection, Our favourite of this collection though was Rene Magritte’s painting of the “The Empire Of Light” a simple landscape showing a house at night time with tress in front and a single simple streetlight illuminating the scene. It was a special piece of work to see, as was Dali’s image “Birth Of Liquid Desires” in which I found myself delving deeper into it, looking closer and being rewarded with a tiny little snail almost too small to see without getting too close. Lovely stuff.
Conclusion
It has been a busy year for me, with the work from Sam’s modules and also the change in my job, but I feel like I’ve worked hard at the briefs and produced some of my best work.
I’ve learnt a lot and helped others learn too in different ways. I’ve learnt about exhibiting work in two different galleries. Conversations between artists and also the RPS Symposium have helped me understand more about artists talk to each other and the questions that rise to the top of the pile, in order to get the maximum information from the person you’re talking to.
Street Photography skills have levelled up since my workshop in London and it helped me to improve by using some techniques that prevent me from bein gdistracted by ideas that may not have any real benefit but also that sometimes this is where the best photos can come from. It certainly challenged me to not feel uncomfortable about practicing on the street.
In terms of people it’s also been a tricky year for me as I joined a new cohort of students and saw my previous cohort go into Level 6. The new group can be loud and sometimes even annoying but I sit out of the way and focus on getting my work done. I’m helpful if asked and sometimes if not asked, with some of my old person people skills sometimes being called upon to smooth out issues that occur within the group.
I change into Level 6 next year with the same coursemates I worked with this year and I’m looking forward to seeing what we all produce. I’m aware though that as a part time student, I’ll likely be spend the whole year doing a dissertation or preparing for the Degree Show, with another year after to do what I left. I have strongly considered dropping out of work and focussing solely on the last level of my degree so I can complete it in a single year but I don’t see a way to be able to financially manage this. Especially when I’ll perhaps be in the job market again at the age of 53 and unable to get a job as well paid as my current role.
We shall see, but for now it’s been a blast!! See you in Level 6.
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