3. Feedback

Spaces to Palaces

brief – submission – blog – feedback 

Tutor feedback, received 31st May 2022 [1]

Overall feedback
There is a wealth of material and presented critical information throughout the pages which are located on your blog, to be honest it is rather overwhelming and a dense presentation through the site.
http://baphot.co.uk/pages_lpe/lpe_part_3_p3.php#conroy [2].

The forensic nature of your methodology is interesting, and the combination of found and existing materials combines some lens-based activity. The project may have been written with this in mind – to equally allow for a more desk/based approach too. I can see and recognise that for those students who are more likely to approach the subject of photography within a space which is deconstructive then it fulfils those requirements. [3]

Exploring transformation and changes that take place over time was well explored and the key strength of the final submission.

‘The realisation that a project’s form and format of presentation is very nearly as important its content is an essential stage in practice development. This is thwarted somewhat by the course’s limitation of online submission’.

I recognise the sentiment expressed above – and your correct in the assumption – however there are ways to overcome this – but I don’t know how to impart this to you. The operation of computer systems beyond simple or complex data crunching and using ‘it’ as a visual tool is a huge topic that I cannot get into here in your report. In one sense the notion of ‘visuality’ is a core ingredient in art and design. This is where your presented work ‘lacks’ what you instinctively are conscious of. The sentence you write is absolutely on the nose. Given it’s a kind of deconstructive and reconstructive activity which you combined, in some way that’s what makes the work difficult to really grasp in its full sense. [4]

One way to express what I mean is by the way of a metaphor, the difference between a report or science paper is that they are very often ‘boring’ to look at – the content is key – but then that’s what distinguishes the various types of minds and personality which have leaning towards either disciplines.

A science report differs from a Tate Catalogue or an artist’s zine etc – for a visual artist the form and function coexist together with some kind of resonances – which can often be based on the ‘intuitive, one can recognise ‘it’ when you see it. That doesn’t help with teaching about it though.

These artists below are both interesting and compelling in the subject they work with and in the work itself. Both show work online via their respective web sites.
I prefer to look at Dan Holdsworth in terms of the way the work is delivered to me via a screen, to be honest Taryn’s site looks dated and does not function very well. There may be many reasons why that is that we are not party to. I think you might understand what I am getting at.

http://tarynsimon.com/
http://holdsworth.works/

When I use the term ‘visuality’ I mean a visual perspective from which certain culturally constituted aspects are visible to a kind of informed viewers. For example, in the vernacular sense when ‘people’ pose for photographs they often smile – of course that fine but if one looks at contemporary high/art photography many creators and viewers might find this aspect outmoded, dated, obsolete etc. This is quite a statement but at its core there’s a nugget of truth in there.

There are software and web apps which during the recent past allow users to be more ‘visual’ without the need to code. Mobirise is a freeware web design application that allows users to design and publish bootstrap websites without coding. This would re-frame what you created and thereby could overcome and help what you know is restricting the work and its ‘visuality’. [5]

http://mobirise.com/

I hope this advice/feedback helps…with this aspect – which at its core is the element which is restricting you in terms of the expectation of progression with the creative, visual and practical elements. [5]

Feedback based on Learning Outcomes

L01 Visual and conceptual strategies
Detailed and extensive work in this aspect that has a strong sense of the interpretation of change thorough a period of time.

L02 Social, cultural and ethical consideration
These changes that take place over time was well considered and the strength of the project – its sense of usefulness, utility and potentiality for community ‘use’.

L03 Exploring a range of ideas
Try to really edit what is key rather than overwhelming amounts of detailed ‘reporting’. [6]

L04 Research, managing time and resources
Much time was given to research given the nature of the subject matter and sifting that would have taken place.

L05 Autonomy, voice and communication
Good news on the volunteer role – this is a really good way to hone skills etc

Action points

The use of the vernacular found, or archive material is a well-trodden path within photography. These sites are useful to look at.

https://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/lost-worlds-extract

I think that looking narratives within tapestry could be interesting for you, given it’s a form which shows elements in one rolling form
https://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/tapestry https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/grayson-perry/


Responses

1

I replied on 3rd June,

Hi [name withheld]

Thanks for your helpful feedback and rewarding links. I would just like to clarify two points,

1. My personal preference in the creation of web sites is to make them dense and labyrinthine and encourage the viewer to head off on tangents. For every course, I also build a simpler, specific WordPress sub-domain for use by my tutor and assessors. I described this approach with LPE Assignment 1 and should have made it clear again with Assignment 3.

Here is BAPhot, the whole degree
and here is the LPE sub-domain.

2. I was quite content with my (theoretical) presentation plan for the Assignment,

“If we were still submitting assignments physically, the main element would be a single scroll of images (with an indication of where the fold would be on a wall), backed up by larger versions of my own component photographs. Judy Fiskin (2011) at 2¼ inches square and Paul O’Kane (2014) at 7cm by 5cm have both proved the effectiveness of small images and so the scroll could successfully convey the concept, though the the final, live display would use images of around postcard size and, where possible, original, used postcards with the messages sent on the reverse available to the viewer separately”
Assignment 3 Reflection

My frustration was that we can now only submit Assignments online and that imposes limitations on my preferred format.

I’ll send in Assignment 4 towards the end of June.

Regards, NickB


2 to be honest it is rather overwhelming and a dense presentation through the site.
http://baphot.co.uk/pages_lpe/lpe_part_3_p3.php#conroy
tutor feedback, see above

The section of notes my tutor cites from Part 3 is this


[8Feb. p.112] The concept of late photography (or ‘aftermath’ photography) can be extended beyond violence and training for violence. The cmat. gives the example of “OCA tutor Andrew Conroy’s Nine former collieries in South Yorkshire“, exploring sites of battles between miners and police and “landscaped” slag heaps.
The cmat. refers to “the subsequent collapse and outsourcing of heavy industry in the UK … [ironic] aspirational housing estates … the erasure of working-class histories, the strategic and political uses of nature, and the accession to hegemony of an aggressive form of post-Fordist capitalism”.
A personal view: Thatcher’s decimation of UK industry and castration of the unions was a turning point in our history, and not a good one. But as a native of South Wales, brought up in the 1950s a few miles from Aberfan, with a partner brought up in a former Nottinghamshire mining village whose father worked at the mine, there are upsides to the ending of this punishing and barbaric industry. And from personal experience of trade unionism in the 1970s and 80s, I can attest that they were not entirely forces for good.

Ultimately, it can be argued that the importance of a large proportion of photography rests in its suspension and recalibration of time, as Barthes argued in Camera Lucida (1980) where he identified the strengths and weaknesses and the fundamental dilemma of the medium (that the creators, handlers and viewers of images will never agree on their meaning, if any).

Campany might have invented the term “late photography”, but its roots could be in “late capitalism”, a Marxist concept, Spätkapitalismus first used in 1898, repurposed by Ernest Mandel in Late Capitalism (1974) and now used to mean, “anything thought unpleasant about life in western society” (Wordsworth, 2022).

Google Translate renders late photography as Späte Fotografie in German.


I have already stated my preference for dense web sites and serendipitous exploration for the general public with separate, austere online provision for academic assessment (see note 1).

On that particular section of text, I have strong feelings on the mining industry and personal, direct experience of working class life in the 1950s and 1960s and of the good and bad aspects of trade union membership and activity in the second half of the 20th century. I regarded the course material (which I habitually abbreviate to “cmat.” in my course notes) in this section of Part 3 (LPE p.112) as simplistic and partial and responded accordingly.

Page 101 of EyV stated,

At OCA we believe that your position or viewpoint is absolutely as valuable as the position of any author that you read; the only difference is that you probably won’t have fully discovered, or at least articulated, it yet. Your viewpoint is the source of your imagination and ideas but it can be quite a long journey to bring it into the light.

Bloomfield, 2017, p.101

Bloomfield, R (2017) Expressing your vision. Barnsley: Open College of the Arts. [EyV]


3 for those students who are more likely to approach the subject of photography within a space which is deconstructive then it fulfils those requirements.
tutor feedback, see above

The Tate online defines deconstruction as,

A deconstructive approach to criticism involves discovering, recognising and understanding the underlying and unspoken and implicit assumptions, ideas and frameworks of cultural forms such as works of art.

Deconstruction is a form of criticism first used by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1970s which asserts that there is not one single intrinsic meaning to be found in a work, but rather many, and often these can be conflicting

The Tate (n.d.)

Joanna Lowry’s description of Geoffrey Batchen’s approach (Durden, 2013),

… the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida … offered Batchen the theoretical tools he needed for proposing a model of photography that would always be unstable, provisional and paradoxical. Batchen’s mapping of photography’s origins demonstrated that photography was always hybrid, embedded in a variety of social and cultural spaces and activities, never pure. A deconstructionist approach enabled him to find a model for thinking about the relationship between a modernist concept of photographic practice and those other vernacular practices of the family snapshot, the memorial image, the album, that continually threatened its sense of self-possession. It offered a useful theoretical solution to the vexed problem of defining photography’s essence by suggesting that it was always in the process of being challenged and redefined by those practices that were at its margins and by its location in real social contexts.

Lowry in Durden, 2013, pp. 22-23

Durden, M. (2013) Fifty key writers on photography. Oxford: Routledge.

The Tate (n.d.) DECONSTRUCTION [online]. tate.org.uk. Available from https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/deconstruction [Accessed 24 Jun 2022].


4 ‘The realisation that a project’s form and format of presentation is very nearly as important its content is an essential stage in practice development. This is thwarted somewhat by the course’s limitation of online submission’.
my reflection text
This is where your presented work ‘lacks’ what you instinctively are conscious of. The sentence you write is absolutely on the nose. Given it’s a kind of deconstructive and reconstructive activity which you combined, in some way that’s what makes the work difficult to really grasp in its full sense.
tutor feedback, see above

The quote from my reflection text describes my recent growing awareness that an idea of how best to present a project is as important as the idea behind the project and both are essential if it is to succeed.

As stated in Response #1, it is conceived as a corner-mounted display of postcard-sized images with explanatory text beside it. If physical submissions were still allowed, I could have aimed for a smaller scale approximation of the notion, but as an online submission it does not work.

I failed to get the point across to my tutor that I have no intention for it to work online, but only as a physical installation.


5 There are software and web apps which during the recent past allow users to be more ‘visual’ without the need to code. Mobirise is a freeware web design application that allows users to design and publish bootstrap websites without coding. This would re-frame what you created and thereby could overcome and help what you know is restricting the work and its ‘visuality’. [5]

http://mobirise.com/

I hope this advice/feedback helps…with this aspect – which at its core is the element which is restricting you in terms of the expectation of progression with the creative, visual and practical elements.
tutor feedback, see above

As I have tried to explain above, I do not regard my work as “restricted”, but I do regard OCA’s insistence on digital submission as unnecessarily limiting.



6 Try to really edit what is key rather than overwhelming amounts of detailed ‘reporting’.
tutor feedback, see above

There was too much text in the online version, my tutor and my follow students in the LPE Chat Group agree. For the full scale physical version of the project, I would intend text volumes approximately equivalent to that seen on Gallery displays, with the option of using both sides of the piece.

As an example, figure A1 shows introductory text on the work of Anastasia Samoylova from the recent Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize at the Photographer’s Gallery. The word count is 208.

Conclusion

I readily accept responsibility for failing to accurately communicate my intentions for the display of Assignment 3. Nevertheless it remains my view that it is legitimate to produce a piece intended for physical display rather than digital.