My Journey Through Body of Work with OCA
After watching the 3 very interesting videos on What is Conceptual Photography? found at: http://www.source.ie/feature/what_is_conceptual.html, I feel more informed to answer the question but my opinion hasn’t changed, rather it has been reinforced.
Today (3/4/2019), I went to visit Daria Martin’s Tonight the World exhibition at the Barbican Curve. This was one of the most immersive and curious exhibitions I’ve been to. I felt like there were lots of hidden meanings I couldn’t quite grasp but yet it was an immensely enjoyable, if slightly disconcerting experience.
I would say that pschogeography is the genre of photography I am naturally most aligned with. I can often be found using my camera as a flâneur wandering around the city and more recently in my local area which encompasses Deptford. I am sometimes aware of where I am headed and sometimes get completely lost, even in my own area, finding new streets and viewpoints within what I thought were familiar places.
Tableaux photography means 'living pictures' and involves the staging of the image, often through theatrical lighting. I had been aware of the tableaux genre of photography before but had managed to skip the part of the definition that the lighting often played a major role. Therefore I had been of the impression that a tableau was simply a staged photograph; particularly one that was made up of composites in order to tell a story.
I was inspired unusually by a video game to make this post which I suppose had been in the back of my head for a while now. In the game Kingdom Hearts III (2019), there is a photography mini-game involving photographing Mickey Mouse emblems. Most of them are against surfaces and are just hard to find. However, one is made up of 3 different circles on 3 different planes that wouldn’t make sense unless viewed from the right perspective. Of course I had come across Georges Rousse before whose work is very similar in execution of this concept but it also made me think of normal or ‘straight' photography. Here, differing subjects are brought together through juxtapositions to form interesting photographs.
I attended a Study Hangout on 21st February 2019 with some of my fellow students specifically about Vilém Flusser’s (1983) book: Towards a Philosophy of Photography. I found I came away with lots of thoughts and inspirations. In the study hangout we quickly identified that the distinction between redundant and informative images was one of the key parts to Flusser’s philosophy.
Following on from a video call with my tutor I have decided to start photographing in my local area in order to get some inspiration for Body of Work.
