Evaluation

Evaluation – Directions Within Photographic Communication

Laura Parkinson

The beginning of this brief flowed well for me, I thought of something I wanted to pursue quickly and my passion for it meant I gained my images fairly quickly as I knew what I was looking for. I complied a collection of images of my subjects from lost photo albums on their shelves and made copies of them so as not to ruin the originals. I was originally going to use the originals, but one of my subjects wanted to keep their image in the photo albums, which meant I had to copy them all to keep the continuity.

Photographing my subjects was challenging to say the least. Some of my subjects wanted to know the ins and the outs of the project, and wouldn’t be photographed until they understood. Although this halted my photography, it was nice to be able to explain my ideas to individuals outside of the photography world, so at least some people understood my research. I took massive inspiration from the work of Rineke Dijkstra and her composition from her ‘Hilton Head Island’ set. The stance of the subjects made them look intriguing, so I decided to use this concept in my work.

InDesign took some getting used to in terms of laying out my book and using the interface. I used InDesign a bit during my college studies to make basic books and display my photography work, but producing a book to certain dimensions ready for printing was a learning curve. I thought the layout of my book was well presented and made the photographs the centre of the book. However, in the future, and when I continue this work on a larger scale over the summer period, I wanted to create my own font and photograph the leather I used on the front of my book so that I can call the work my own completely, without having to think about copyright and legalities.

Overall, I think that this module went well, I learnt a lot about producing my own book and ways of presenting my work to a wider audience. I now want to extend this project over the summer, and produce a full project looking at the decline of printed images and how people used to treat them, and get that book printed as my first photography production.