Project 6: Photography II Light Exercise 7: Personal Voice

This exercise is preceded by some notes on familiar subjects for photography, or, indeed, many creative media. Examples are given for Google image searches for ‘landscape’ and ‘portrait’. The selection of images, despite showing different locations or faces, all look similar because they obey the conventions of the genre. The challenge is, therefore, to create an original image.

I did a Google image search for ‘park’.

As with ‘landscape’, these images mostly conform to a traditional composition, showing sky at the top, which is sometimes masked by the tops of trees, a mid ground which tends to look some way into the distance, and a foreground showing some object or figure of interest as a focal point. There are some exceptions, but this describes the majority of the images above.

In response to this I went into the park and took a series of photos of landscape ‘slices’. By this I mean that I stood in one spot and took a number of photos of parts of the landscape, such as sky, tops of trees, things at eye level, things below eye level, and the ground. I repeated this process several times, turning to face a different direction for each series, whilst remaining standing on the same spot. I had some idea that I would make some kind of cylindrical image with crops from the photos attached together to form a composite 3D image. I was still thinking about my observation in my previous post that every image is already a subjective edit, even before the shutter clicks, and that the only way to begin to approach objectivity would be to combine many images by many people.

When I got home and looked at my photos, and looked again at my screenshots of park photos, I thought that my idea of combining landscape slices would actually be a convoluted way of following the stereotype. I would still have the same compositional elements as the image search results. I spent more time looking at my photos and thinking about my own experience of the park. Looking at the sky photos I realised how infrequently I raise my eyes to look at the sky above me.I see the sky in front of me but I rarely look right up. By contrast, I spend a lot of time looking down at the paths so that I can see where I’m going. I tend not to walk on the grass because I can’t see the lumps and bumps of the uneven sloping ground. It’s easier for me to stick to the paths.

I followed this observation by pulling all the photos that contained bits of path into a separate album. In a way, I had inadvertently followed Bill Brandt’s methodology to create “camera vision” (as documented in the OCA notes) as I hadn’t  composed these shots individually or focused on including parts of the paths. Even so, I had quite a number of photos that had bits of path in them somewhere.

I decided to make a photomontage of paths. It wouldn’t be true to life, as nowhere in the park would afford a view of so many paths, or the path parts arranged in new ways. However, to focus on the paths is true to my experience of following the paths in the park every day. I had happened to capture a photo of my shadow in my landscape slices and I decided to use this to put myself in the scene, and then I arranged other photos around it to make a network of paths.

It took a lot of trial and error to arrange the pieces. Given that this was an unplanned outcome I’m pleased with how it turned out. I like that it’s obvious that many images are combined, and that there is a partial level of perspective which give a sense of the spaciousness of the park. Despite the fact that the image doesn’t show the park as it really is, it does convey my experience of the park. Obviously I had to leave out many important features of the park, and different stories could be told with those. This image, though, shows a non-stereotypical view of a landscape and was interesting and satisfying to create.