Brief

Work through these documents:

• Editing and Sequencing

Consider ways you might integrate some of the ideas and methods into your own developing practice work and reflect on the material in these on your blog.

Look out for:

• OCA Study Visit activity related to the Challenging Genre theme. There is a wider Challenging Genre Padlet (accessible to all Photography students) and a dedicated section in Viewfinder.

• Student work exhibitions, such as this Stage two Student Work Showcase from the November 2021 Assessment event.

• Relevant current exhibitions, talks and projects external to OCA.

• You can also engage constructively with other students work-in-progress to share peer support, ideas and feedback via the Self Directed Project Forum.

Again consider any inspiration you might integrate into your own developing practice work and reflect on the material in these on your blog.

My initial thoughts about how I might sequence my images had been simply in date order. (The date each crime took place). I realise that this needs to be a much more thought-out decision!
Currently, when I am creating a series, I would leave the images for a week or a few days and then come back to them with fresh eyes. This helps me to look at them from more of an objective viewpoint.
I need to determine if placing my images in a particular sequence would matter for this project? They might be easier to look at or fit together better, or perhaps “easier on the eye” but does this add something to the meaning? Perhaps the order they are in won’t matter at all but how they are presented will? I guess it would if I wanted there to be a “beauty” element to the series. I need to keep this in mind and come back to the sequencing once I have a few more images to work with.

Listening to Kate Nolan talking about the selection process for her photobook “Neither” was very useful. I hadn’t thought about people using designers. This allows for a complete outsider’s view. She says “I would never have put these two (images) together” (Nolan K) the designer is looking at things from a “purely visual” (Nolan K) perspective. She also stated that she went to the designer with a very tight edit in the first place. Out of hundreds of photographs she only went to the designer with around 60. The book has around 44 images in total.

Reading the interview with Katherine Macdaid made me think again about text and how much I want to guide the viewer. What do I want them to think, feel or come away with after looking at the images?  She says “Images on their own often float about on a sea of meaning, the text guides the viewer, reinforcing their intuition as to what the work is about” (Macdaid K.) This reinforced my idea of having a small white sticker on each image with a unique reference number, making them feel more like records than just photos. The work is presented in storybook (fairytale) style. I wonder if I need to look at presenting the images in “crime scene style” and if, whatever that might be, is recognisable considering the images I’m talking about were being viewed by me in the 1980s and 1990s. Crime scene-style postcards with white labels on them in a rack? Am I losing the “sublime” element of the images that I started out with?

In  “The Language of Pictures: Exploring sequences with Mark Powel, it said “You can’t have a relentless sequence of ‘big pictures’. There have to be moments of quiet as well” This is something that I need to keep in mind and think about both whilst taking the shots and when editing and sequencing. I also had not come across the idea of two images that might not be that remarkable on their own being lifted by each other and “suggest a sort of ‘third thing’ floating somewhere between the two. I have been deliberating on how I can bring these seemingly very disparate shots together and the idea of a floating ‘third thing’ that is created in the viewer’s imagination is fascinating, but may not work for this particular project. In fact, this presentation style might have a negative impact on how the images are perceived.

In Jiorg Colbert’s “Understanding Photobooks, I hadn’t really thought about the amount of thought and work that goes into producing a “good” photobook. Simple bullet points such as

• What does this book do?
• What is it telling me?
• How is it telling me that?
• What are the pictures telling me, and what does the way the book is put together tell me?

have really got me thinking about what I might want to achieve if the images were to become part of a photobook. This also can just apply to the images themselves and how they are presented, even if that isn’t in a Photobook style.

Each image has its own individual story and all the images together create a narrative relating to my memory, crime, and crime scene locations. I need to start thinking how this can be incorporated in my idea.