Record a real conversation with a friend.​ (It’s up to you whether you ask permission or not!) Before listening to the recording, write your account of both sides of the conversation.
Then listen to the recording and make note of the discrepancies. Perhaps there are unfinished sentences, stammers, pauses, miscommunications etc.
Reflect​ upon the believability of re-enacted narratives and how this can be applied to constructed photography. What do you learn from the conversation recording process and how can you transfer what you learned into making pictures?

I really didn’t understand how this exercise related to photography. I generally read through all the exercises and assignment to give me a bit of an idea what is coming. When I read this one, I really was worried about how I was going to answer this question! As with other exercises in the past on this course I decided just to have faith that everything that came before would help me to understand what was needed.

I was not disappointed. The second part of exercise 1 (LINK) took me to an image by Jeff Wall called A woman with a covered tray (2003). Some research into this and some more of Walls images, revealed that many of them were staged from memory to represent something that Wall had actually seen. On reading this I remembered this exercise and hoped (still hoping) that this is the sort of thing that it is referring to.

The conversation differed in the small detail quite a bit. The general discussion was very much the same but I had missed, not heard or forgotten perhaps parts of the conversation that were less important to me. There was a bit of a selfishness to my memory of the conversation. I wrote down more about the bits of the conversation that I contributed to and less to that of the other person. I suspect that is quite a normal situation. So in essence I remembered the “bigger picture” format quite a bit of detail and my memory was biased to the things I thought, replied or asked.

I suspect this might transfer in the same way if I were to create a photograph from memory. Some detail lost, maybe some personal detail being seen as more important. The general bigger picture there and a more personal viewpoint than might have been evident in the “real event.

The believability if re enacted narratives depends on a great deal. Are there objects in the scene that could not exist in the particular situation or that do not exist at all!. We may notice other things that tell us the image is staged. The angle, colour or tone of the light. The obvious location of cameras in order to get a shot that would not be possible naturally. What people are doing, their stance their facial expressions. All of these can contribute to our belief of a re enacted narrative. We may want it to look odd, we may want the viewer to question the narrative and to know that it is staged but wonder why it has been staged in this way.