Project 5: Photography I Assignment Five: Narrative

I’m still not really sure what is the difference between exercises and assignments in the context of this course. I feel like the exercises should be brief investigative tasks and the assignments should be a bigger body of work. That doesn’t seem to be how it works, but I haven’t yet understood how it does actually work.

Anyway, for the assignment in this project, the first part of the work is to select one photo from each of the nine exercises in this project and create a narrative. It can be a story with a beginning, middle and end, or a more oblique narrative. 

Initially I thought back over the photos I’ve taken and started constructing a story in my mind. I had some exercises with not many kinds of image and others with many options. I realised that I would have to include images of the lake in my local park, and also two portraits. On my morning walk I made up a longish story about a woman who goes on a magical journey in which she shrinks in size, somewhat like Alice in Wonderland, sees many things from interesting perspectives, then has to go to the hidden place behind the hill in order to be restored magically to her original size. I thought I could either make a book with a few paragraphs accompanying each photo, or have it made into a photobook.  

Then I came home and read the instructions again and realised that it’s supposed to be a visual narrative such as a nine frame grid or a set of collaged photos, not a written story with the photos as illustrations, so I abandoned my story and started to think again.

I selected a few photos from each exercise and put them into a new album so that I could look at them together. I selected them based on which photos I thought were most successful and which I liked best, with the added decision that the narrative wold work better if the two portraits were of the same person, and all the other photos were from the park as the exercises on scene and point had to be of the lake. Having considered this group of images, I further selected and rejected until I had one photo from each exercise. 

I couldn’t progress any further on screen. I felt that I needed to physically hold and arrange and rearrange the photos in order to find my narrative. I printed them in a small size, fitting all nine onto two sheets of A4, then roughly cropped them apart so I could hold them like a pack of cards. As is becoming my practice at the moment, I printed them on both white and cream paper. I then pulled out a large piece of paper and started arranging the photos. The arrangements outgrew the paper as I went along.

I started by trying to group similar images together. However, using a grid arrangement meant that what worked horizontally also needed to work vertically. I wished I’d had the foresight to read the entire project before starting on any of the exercises, as I could then have planned to take a series of images that could work better together. On the other hand, that might have been less fun, and having a more challenging task isn’t always a bad thing.

I rejected the grid composition though. It felt to me that it occupied that awkward position of ‘not quite’. A grid is an orderly arrangement, yet the mix of portrait and landscape orientation and one square image disrupted that sense of order. That could be a useful strategy if a more unsettling narrative was required, but the content of each photo individually doesn’t suggest that.

I tried some less geometric compositions but they didn’t hit the spot either.

I tried a more collaged look. I could use various kinds of backgrounds and make this more of a scrapbook page. But grouping the photos in this way left parts obscured, and as it’s primarily a photography  assignment this didn’t seem satisfactory.

Then I had a breakthrough. As an antidote to the fan arrangements, I picked all the photos up again and laid them out in the order they would have appeared in my initial idea of the story about the magical changing of size. It worked! Even without going into the story in detail, it seems, to me at least, that there is a sense of progression through the images in this linear presentation.

I think picked up the pile of prints on cream paper and laid them out in the same order, to see which I preferred  I like the warmer tones on the cream paper. In some cases the details are not quite so sharp as they are on the white photo paper, but that seems to fit with the idea of them forming a story and being slightly removed from the real world.

How to present them? I thought they could work well in an accordion book, where each photo can be seen individually or in pairs as the pages are turned, or stretched out in a line if the accordion is fully extended  I remembered that in my little pile of empty sketchbooks I have a couple of the Seawhites small accordion books so I pulled one out and counted the spreads. There are nine! That seemed to endorse my plan!  

I auditioned one of my small images in one of the book spreads and decided that it could work with the prints a bit bigger and some thought to any background elements  

At that point I put everything away and took the weekend to mull things over in terms of next steps. Having written this up, I will now go and work on those.