New Year, New Start!

Well I have to say it… I am now officially in my final year of my Photography Degree.
It’s so scary!

I have completely dived into my work head first and feel like I was drowning for the first two weeks, however now that I feel more settled I can pick myself and begin my projects.
For this blog, I will mainly be concentrating on my practical work for this year which will be Independent Study and Resolutions!

IDEAS FOR INDEPENDENT STUDY

So… The idea I have for I.Study is to work with the body, in particular taking a further look into Jacques Lacan’s mention of the fragmented image in his essay The Mirror Stage. 
To get the ball rolling, I have created a mood board on Pintrest (you can view it here http://uk.pinterest.com/lucyyates92/) to help me think of ways of how I can photograph the body.
The interest in nude/photographing the body first came to me when I was participating in a work experience project with a small production company in King’s Lynn. The brief for this mini project was to organise “Fine art nude” photo shoots suitable to put into a calender for 2015. I had so much fun and learnt so much, but unfortunately I had to stop attending due to my studies at UCA and thus no longer taking part.
HOWEVER, the small amount of knowledge I acquired, I am eager to create my own photo-shoots for university and push my knowledge further and gain confidence in this genre.

So there we have it!
Oh! Before I forget, for anybody that is doing an art-related course at any level, I recommend Pintrest as a great way to help you create mood-boards and gain ideas to help you being your projects. My friend introduced me to it and I am so thankful she did!

Idea Map: My Life

I decided to create a mind-map purely focusing on the theme of my life.
By doing this, I hope it will help me to gain some sort of structure on how I will be able to shape my project in both my digital format and my final product.

 

 

When creating this mind-map, I discovered that in my family archive, I know I have a mixture of both formal photographs (eg: School Portraits and Holiday Snapshots). In my tutorial with Ellen Nolan, we discussed about having the same, if not similar format of photographs throughout the project. I think once I have dug into the boxes full of photographs I will have to experiment with how I can incorporate the formal portraits with my holiday snapshots.

Tutorial 24/01/14 – Ellen Nolan NOTES

I had a tutorial with Ellen Nolan today. Going to this tutorial really helped as I was feeling completely stuck with what to do as part of my Narrative Unit.
I explained the two ideas (from previous post of my idea mind-map) and she really liked the idea of using myself however she felt that I needed more than just my RAF WARMA marching photographs.

These are the notes I took in my tutorial:

• Journey – keep it as a main theme for this project
• Young age photographs of myself –> how I look now. Cropping of images/full length = try and get them all in a similar format.
• Idea of time – what role does it play?
• Narration for Digital piece – Don’t rule out voice, experiment with recordings and text/captions.
• My view of change – narration?
• People who know me commenting on change of me growing up / views of me.
• Slow sequence for slideshow of images –> change speed slightly reflecting on how quickly I grew up as a child.

After much discussion of ideas for my digital version of my photographs, we then went onto discussing what I should do as the final product that I have to hand in in March. I came up with the idea of creating a photo-album and placing pictures inside with hand-written captions next to them.
What I like more, is that this project will be left pretty open and unfinished, thus allowing me to continue on with taking pictures of myself during special occasions as well as growing up/older.

Next Steps:

• Create a mind-map of ideas with what I can do – help me progress with the outcome of Myself.
• Contact my Mum to see if I can look through the family archive of images.
• Sift through my personal images (contact friends/family if need be) and find images of different areas of my life (EG: ATC Years, 18th Birthday, 21st Birthday, College, High School, University, Family Reunions/Weddings, etc)
• Create a timeline to help me shape my slideshow / build my family album.
• Begin artist research.

Inspiration

To help me try and think of ideas to start my Narrative Project off, I decided to write down a list of everything that I find inspirational. I felt that this was a good way to start this project as I was feeling really confused and stuck on where I should begin to start.  This list includes things from idols such as Sir Ranulph Fiennes (A British explorer) to books such as Private Peaceful.
By doing this, I hope to gain some confidence in knowing where to start for getting ideas.

My Inspirations

• Sense of Adventure
• Memory
• History – World War I & II, 1940’s
• The Body
• Family and Friends – Mum, Brother, Stepfather, Sara, Kierran
• Sir Ranulph Fiennes
• Captain Robert Falcon Scott
• Ernest Shackleton
• Monty Halls
• Tattoos
• Rockabilly
• Armed Forces
• Fairytales / Fantasy
• Marilyn Monroe.

Artists andPhotographers

• Andy Warhol
• David Bailey
• Elsie Wright & Frances Griffiths
• Chris Duffy
• Charley Macksey
• Ansel Adams
• Tim Walker
• Annie Leibovitz
• Nan Goldin
• Robert Mapplethorpe
• Eve Arnold
• Jackson Pollock
• Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Jo Spence

Music

• Dave McPherson
• Martin Harley / Band
• Acoustic & Classical Guitar
• Dave Grohl /Foo Fighters
• Military Marching Songs
• Glenn Miller Orchestra
• Mumford & Sons

Books

• Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
• Private Peaceful – Michael Morpurgo
• Harry Potter – J.K. Rowling
• Brothers Grimm Fairytales
• The Secret Garden – Frances. H. Burnett
• PS. I Love You – Cecilia Ahern
• Wizard’s First Rule – Terry Goodkind
• A Game of Thrones – George R.R. Martin.

Film & TV

• Saving Private Ryan
• Pearl Harbor
• Glenn Miller Story
• Singin’ In The Rain
• Alice in Wonderland
• A Game of Thrones
• ‘Allo ‘Allo
• Snatch
• Cast Away
• Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal,Red Dragon, Hannibal Rising)
• Marvel / DC films
• Beauty and the Beast
• Open All Hours
• Immortals
• Bridget Jones’ Diary
• Lock, Stock & Two Smokin’ Barrells
• Schindler’s List
• Downton Abbey
• Doctor Who.