28th September 2023
As a collective across the two years, we have a good sense of humour. A lot of us felt the final arrangement of our pieces was a good message about the place we live, intentional or not.
Part of working as a collaboration is that we have to evaluate how well we feel it had or hasn’t gone. Being totally honest here, I have not 100% enjoyed this project at all. There were elements that I absolutely loved like the film photography and learning about developing negatives and exposing the images. That I found really interesting, although my brain did ache.
We had a very rough start and I honestly didn’t think we were going to work well together as a team at all. Although we did and I’m not quite sure how that happened, possibly because the three of us all wanted to do well in the first project of the year.
I still feel we didn’t follow the brief, although looking at the final result of the works together, it turns out to have worked really well to create a bizarre yet accurate reflection of Weston Super Mare.
For me what didn’t work was the fact the initial brief was more or less ignored and I guess that set the tone for how I wanted to engaged with the other two. When they both said about wanting train tracks and actually agreed with each other, I seized on that idea and knew that I had various images of trains on tracks from having days out with my son. The one that everyone liked was the Flying Scotsman passing through Weston Super Mare. The only flaw being that the original file sent across wasn’t a good quality jpeg. This limited us in how big we could blow up the image without it being too distorted with pixelation.
What worked well was that the three of us problem solved and came up with some good solutions as ideas were bounced back and forth, like standing the train up at an angle to the track. The threat of the storm on the day we were supposed to be doing outside photoshoot of the object, meant that we risked only having indoor images. One of the first years took the cardboard image home the evening before and took some photographs on the beach, so we at least had some outdoor images to choose from. However, the rain held off and the two of us that hadn’t taken images went to the beach and enjoyed working together to get some images. The funny thing about this is that I was using all my knowledge of being an amateur photographer to try and line up the light, focus and wait for the background to be clear. Yet the other person was just randomly snapping and I think she got one of the sharpest and better angles of the train coming at you from the sand. Her images were really good, yet she dismissed using them.
I do feel that when we came back and the other person was editing their DSLR shots that they had decided what the final image would be. I did make some comments about it being better if the train had looked a bit closer to the sunset, and by the end of the day I think it had been edited that way. The tutors all like it, and the other first year was happy to go along with it. Sometimes it’s better to just go with it, I feel like any objections I have would come out as sour grapes.
At the end of the day did we fulfil the project? Yes I guess we did, we took a photo of something, enlarged it and rephotographed it in a place you wouldn’t expect to see it. So technical yes we reframed it.
Was I a bit black and white in my views on this? Yes, and that’s probably because my initial views and ideas were dismissed without even being listened to properly. I still feel that we should have agreed to rephotograph something together on the college grounds and go with that, as that was the initial brief.
Am I happy with the final outcome? Yes.
I have a film photograph of the Flying Scotsman rising out of the sand on Weston Super Mare beach, that I think even my dad, an avid steam train enthusiast, would have found amusing.
Helen Louise Art 