a snow picture

What have I been seeing lately?

A recent mishap with some films has meant the only work I have to show are some questionable photos from the big chill... A change is coming, I am out and about with my camera a lot more and getting back into doing as much work as I was doing towards the end of uni! lets go!

I miss it

Portfolio

Hand made portfolio box, built up edges from cardboard and hand covered. A labour of love.

Handprinted photos, window mounted on mist paper. Letter pressed titles.

Finally...

14 page, handmade concertina book, material cover on board, letter pressed title and writings with scanned photographs of Lymm Park, Stockport.

Degree Show!

Some of my work, more detailed photos of my book coming soon.

Pictures from a book i'm making. I call them the Lymm Series, the book will be called What I've been seeing, Lately.

Read this people! It's really helped me put photography into perspective!

This week I will mostly be scanning, printing in the dark room and begging the mac suite to let me print on my own paper! not long left to go yet.

What I've Been Seeing, Lately.

I have temporarily abandoned digital! It was a bit of an accident, stumbled upon Kodak 400 VC 120 film and fell in love with it a bit, thank you lomo shop london! I can put it straight through the C41 and it makes such interesting colours which come out amazingly when scanned in the flexi scan, they have come out a lot differently after being manually printed but i don't mind.

The move from digital to film which is the reverse of what I seemed to do at the beginning of uni, has made me thing about ownership of photographs..... My photography has become a lot more personal and film helps back up this idea even more, I have started making photographs that I can then put complete ownership on, I have taken the time to look at something and decide if it's worth using one of my precious 12 negatives to record it... I then go to the C41 and it becomes my negative, i go to the scanner and it becomes my tiff file, i go to the little curtained room in the machine dark room and it becomes my own 10x10 print!

This blog is going to be used to show current and previous work, inspiration and just stuff i have seen lately. Enjoy!

Since review last term i have had a change within my work.

After realising that my work held no personal or photographic meaning, I started to look more closely around me in a more reflective and insightful way. I have started to work towards using photography as a way of expressing myself, my little work, likes/dislikes etc, things that make up me. To be able to express this further I have started to work with image and text, using different methods such as ink on skin, letter press, typewriter, diary and screen print.

These different processes have made me realise that i am not using photography to lead to a grand end result, I'm using it to realise what is around me and exploring this

Which leads me to the quote i think I'm going to use in my artist statement in the degree show

"I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed"
- Gary Winogrand

I found this quote in the book "The ongoing moment" by Geoff Dyer, I recommend it to any photography student, it has helped me a lot. From this book I took the fact that there is no infinite amount of things to photograph. Aha lot of the most famous contemporary photographers have photographs that are almost identical.

Another good quote from to further enforce this "Often it turns out that when things have been photographed they look like other photographs, either ones that have been taken or ones that are waiting to be taken"

This helped me realise that as long as I had some kind of method and understanding behind me, it doesn't matter what you take photos of.