Create a series of work (aim for 7–10 images) which in some way reflects upon the ideas surrounding identity and place that you’ve looked at so far in this course. Use the written word to play a part in its creation.

You may be inspired by a poem, song or a novel or decide to write your own fictive piece. You may draw upon other people’s words via eavesdropping or another source or use extracts from journals. You might find interesting textual accounts in archives in libraries that could inform this assignment. Allow your creativity to be spurred on by spending time with these words and reflecting on them.

Be wary of illustrating your text with pictures and vice versa. Allow for the viewers’ interpretation to be opened up rather than shut down by the pairings. You may decide not to include the actual words in the final production; that’s fine, as long as they have in some way informed the research and development of the concepts and have pushed the imagery further as a result.

● Write a short reflective commentary (around 500 words) describing how your chosen ‘​words​’ have informed your series of images and make this available to your tutor alongside your images. 

Research: Duane Michals and Jim Goldberg
Research: Diambra Mariani and Maria Teresa Salvati
Planning and Creation

The idea for the Assignment  came from noticing how the city I live in was expanding and how I seemed to reach it much earlier than I used to 20 years ago, when traveling back  from any direction, I can’t a remember exactly what the houses, offices and all the other buildings have replaced but I suspect it was farmland and countryside. I wondered if I could find a poem or a piece of written work that fitted with this observation. I was rather stunned to find Philip Larkins poem “Going Going” seemed to fit very well with my thoughts, although having been written in 1972 it does sound very much out of step with todays thoughts on the planet and climate change. I found a youtube video of Larkin himself reading the Poem and loved his beautiful clipped english accent. This wonderful English upper class accent is also being lost in the same way the the countryside is being taken over so I thought it would be very apt to use his actual recording.

Having spent a couple of years in an out of lockdown through the pandemic, and having lost a few close family members in that time, I really didn’t want to put myself through a project that was all “doom and gloom” and “end of the world climate change” centric. I wanted to be positive and optimistic about the future, and although Larkins poem isn’t particularly optimistic, neither is it “we are all going to die and there’s no future” He does see a future. I wanted to try and get across a feeling that we are losing something but what that is being replaced with isn’t all that bad sometimes. We do have to look after the planet but we do have to expand and those ideas can work together. I wanted to make sure the the poem did not describe the images as they appeared, but through looking and listening that a general idea of change, but not all bad, was gained by the viewer/listener.

I wanted the images to give a sense of the countryside in harmony with man made buildings and objects and for them to be pleasing to the eye and not be viewed as “eyesores”. Listening to the poem without the images, there is quite a pessimistic feel to it, particularly towards the end. Viewing the images without the poem leaves you with a set of 9 pleasant images that perhaps give a sense that these man made objects can be viewed in a positive way. The poem defiantly gives the images context and helps to balance the pessimistic and the optimistic.

I took the majority of the images whilst on a journey from the UK through France and into Italy over a three day period. I keept the poem in mind, listening to and reading it on a regular basis to try and influence the shots that I took. Some of the shots were taken from the car whilst we were moving.

Creating a movie was something I had never done before and it really worked well for this project. Any other way of presenting would not have allowed the viewer to look and  listen simultaneously, and in sequence.