Although I have been constantly evaluating this project as I have been going along I feel it necessary to do a final evaluation that brings together all my thoughts on the project and my progress through it. After receiving the brief I started to think about various things I could do in response to it, I came to the conclusion that the photos I prefer to take often involve people and so logically it would be based around portraits. After my final project at the end of first year, based around the definition of snapshots and portraits, I thought that regulated portraiture was the next logical step.
I decided that I would focus on taking more controlled portraits in either studio or defined spaces, in retrospect I didn't really take any studio pictures but tended to take photos in the subjects home in an attempt to present them in their own environments and surrounded by their own possessions. Although this was a logical progression it lead to what I feel are slightly boring and rigid photos that I wouldn't otherwise take, I am glad that I have improved my understanding and skills in relation to studio lighting and set up/posed photos but I feel that these photos aren't particularly my style or overall that interesting to me. I found that pictures taken in various locations, either around the subjects home or out of it were more interesting due to the locations and scenarios it put them in.
I feel this links to my exhibition piece as it is an example of the kind of photo I enjoy taking and would like to take, essentially what I wished the photos in this project had been, however by setting myself controlled conditions I closed the door on natural light and real life scenarios that I would have much rather preferred to show. In some respects this makes me wish that I'd approached the project differently and instead of photographing multiple people I would have focused on one or two people and intensely photographed them over a long period of time, almost stalking them to get the most lifelike and natural portraits of the given person. I feel that by doing this I could have incorporated studio lighting and rigid conditions but also their day to day activities and thus taken less forced pictures as a result of this, I feel that this may be a personal project that I will set for myself in the future in order to grasp the concept of portraiture to an even further level. In terms of the collection I have produced a collection of portraits of individual people within individual books but I have also presented these in a collection of their own in the box shown previously.
It is important to notice that the making of the booklets and the presentation of them was as important as taking the pictures that went into them, although I have a limited knowledge of design and layout I felt that it was important to try and present my work in professional manor. As mentioned in my previous blog posts I tried various different shapes and sizes of book before coming to the conclusion that square books would be the most appropriate. After this I designed a sleeve and came to a final design and produced it to a level that I was happy with, I feel that my book gives a semi professional look but still feels handmade and like care has been taken in producing it and his is exactly as I had wanted and had previously mentioned in my blog when talking about zines and self publishing.
Overall this brings me to a fairly succinct conclusion that I have achieved what I had set out to do in that I have produced a series of portraits of individuals presented and presented them in a collection of small booklets. I feel that I have done this to a reasonable level but that the nature of the project and my response to the brief was somewhat limiting and by setting myself certain perimeters I had closed the door on a lot of various possibilities. Essentially I feel that I have completed the task that I had set myself but also that the task was fairly mild and could have been a lot more challenging. I feel that I have progressed in this project but also that I could have progressed a lot more and so my intentions are to ensure that throughout personal projects and the upcoming Live Project module I will really push myself in order to define my own visual style, I feel that this is my biggest downfall in this project as it is based around visual language and I feel that most of the work I have produced is not particularly the style of photos I enjoy taking or want to take. All in all this has been an enjoyable project that I feel I have completed but at the moment I am seeing it more as a stepping stone towards later projects and the development of my own visual style as opposed to a stand alone project. It is this train of thought that makes me feel like I am on the way into third year and being a professional practitioner, at the start of second year we were told that the tutors see the course as having a first and third year and that the second year is just a transition period between the two, I am now starting to understand this and feel that this project and the current state I am in is reflecting my own transition period in the course.
