Project 6: Exercise 1 – Developing a Project Plan

Brief

To develop a plan for your project you may have more than one idea. To begin focusing your thoughts and to bring together a project plan you can produce a diagram or mind map. This will help you to begin visualising your ideas and how they sit in relation to different existing genres, themes or subjects.

Read pages 6-27 in N. Caruana and A. Fox, Behind The Image – Research in Photography(2012) Bloomsbury.

To get started, respond briefly* to the following sub-headings:

Choose a Subject
Consider form and how you might approach the subject
A topic or theme should emerge
Who is Your audience?
Approach and methods
Choice of platform to host work-in-progress

*Your response doesn’t have to be a formal written document, it can take a free-form approach of whatever method works best for your creativity. As a guide a paragraph under each of the headings is more than enough to get started. You might want to use the Photography Project Self-Evaluation Form on page 101 of Caruana and Fox’s book as a starting point. Simple key words in each heading will generate ideas which may form a more detailed ‘statement of intent’ at course end.

Genre, Theme, Subject

A genre is different to a theme or subject matter because it is broader in its scope, concerned less with the detail or methodology of the photographic work and more with categorisation – the area within which it would be (or would like to be) recognised.

A theme is a unifying idea or issue that brings together a set of work. It may also refer to the concept behind the project. It is connected to the meaning you want to infer, through the subject matter you choose.

The subject is generally the primary object you are pointing your camera at. It is the thing that you choose to convey your underlying theme. As David Hurn in On Being a Photographer: A Practical Guide remarks: “the photographer is, primarily, a subject-selector” (Hurn, 1997: 29).

Chapters 2 & 3 in N. Caruana and A. Fox, Behind The Image – Research in Photography(2012) Bloomsbury provide helpful guidance for developing your ideas and practice.

You may find some of the following questions useful to consider in your planning stage:

Where do your ideas sit in relation to different genres, what subject matter might you choose to represent your concept or theme?
How might you position your work in relation to what already exists?
How might your genre/theme/subject impact on your working method?
Which Photographers are relevant to your ideas, working methods, or techniques?
How will they impact on the development of your work?
What photographic or creative techniques will you experiment with?
How might text enable you to open up or close down readings of your work and chosen genre?

From your initial mind-map or diagram, you will need to develop a clearer brief written outline of what you hope to explore and potentially produce.

Once you have written your potential project plan, you can discuss this along with your technical or visual strategies, before you get too far into the project itself. Seek peer support by posting your plan to the Self Directed Project Forum for peer feedback.

I decided the best way to go about this project was to begin by creating a Padlet to hold my evolving thoughts about the SDP and to answer some of the questions posed in the exercise.