Note to Self

I feel that this course is making me more focused in my practice. I feel more comfortable with my style of photography and have a more positive outlook of what I potentially can do with it and where it might fit. My approach to photography has pretty much always been related to exploring places, searching for locations that seem to tell a story. I took this same approach to my work this term but I also did portraits of people that I meet along the way. This was a first for me and to my surprise it felt very natural and I think the portraits worked quite well with the landscapes. I’m a bit worried though, that there is not enough stories to my work or that it lacks clarity. I research and read a lot but perhaps the images I take are to general? My ambition is not to create classic photo essays but more trying to give a sense or understanding of a place. At times I feel torn between aesthetics and content….
I want to continue to photograph in the same way for the borders project. I would also like to include text in future work, perhaps quotes or statistics to go with the images. I did experiment with that this term but feel that I have some way to go.

For me, being on this course has been very stimulating and really good for developing my thinking and understanding of the direction I want to take with my photography.
My experiences in Wimba World has been mainly positive. I find it hard though to be communicative and miss the form of the traditional classroom interaction. I think talking in small groups will help me a lot. But at the same time I really enjoy studying with everyone on the course and the fact that we live in so many different places adds a great sense of diversity and experience. The blogs are brilliant, it is great to read what everyone is doing, quite addictive, and I must start to write more on mine….

It was really good to do the ‘person at work’ etc. assignments, this has really made me a lot more aware of composition and the way I frame things. Saying that, I still keep ending up with some unforgivably crap images of things sticking out of peoples heads etc. I have also enjoyed the photographer lectures. It was new to me to look at some of these photographers’s practice in relation to other photographers work produced in the same era. And I can never have enough of photographer’s such as Evans, Frank, Eggleston and Sternfeld.
The photographer talks have been really interesting and I hope that we will get a lot more of them. Zijo Gafic’s work inspired me the most.

I need to learn more technical skills, my photoshop skills could be a lot better, trying to read things but learning curve is slow. It is also all the multimedia stuff, I feel a bit behind, some kind of workshop would be good…


Though I do enjoy shooting with an SLR I really feel the happiest with medium format, I’m drawn to the more ‘formal look’ and it feels the most suited for the type of images I like to take. And…I never thought I say this but I’m thinking of picking up the 5x4. I’m so in love with the formal and technical quality of the images it produces, but at the same time, this way of photographing will be completely new to me and the whole slowness and heaviness of the camera puts me off. I might just be too impatient to handle it, but I really want to have a go.

All done!

Just finished, it feels really good, I think. I always find it really hard to hand in work, I want to do more. I have spent the last week changing and cutting my essay. I hope I didn't cut to much. Robert Frank's images keeps appearing in my dreams. I got a ferry to catch in a few hours, no point going to sleep... So looking forward to holiday, driving to Sweden this year so I can stop and see friends on the way.

I want to continue with the Thames Estuary project when I get back but also start to think about borders project.

New exhibition on the Thames Estuary

Just came across this on the Guardian website - an exhibition called Soundings from the Estuary about the Thames Estuary off course. From what I can see off the pics on the site it focuses on the landscape. Guardian wrote:
'Artists have set out to capture the archaic sights and sounds of the Thames Estuary before its transformation from marshland to new town as the Thames Gateway Development. Soundings from the Estuary is an ongoing project inspired by the estuary's industrial, architectural, and maritime traces as well as the threat from construction and rising sea levels. Frank Watson’s photographs’s will feature with artists Germander Speedwell and Dave Lawrence at the Contemporary Urban Centre in south London, from June 20-July 20 2008.' The radar tower at Tilbury and the Tilbury power station which I have photographed as well is among the images featured on the website. There will be a talk at Tate Modern about the exhibition on 11th of July but I will be in Sweden then - really frustrating. I have to go and see this exhibition now, I am just so curious and in all honesty a bit gutted. It's hard not to get upset when you realise someone has already done a piece of work on the same topic as you. It is different though but nevertheless...
Good news though is my camera is not broken, took the role I had in the camera in for processing and it came out fine. My local lab said it sounded like the chemistry had been off on my mystery roles, anyway best thing is I can carry on shooting.
Trying to focus and write intro to my project, I find it difficult to get the tone right, what fits with images... Also struggling with a title. Some thoughts: estuary tide, out of tide, tidal time, tide & time, esturial........

My negs are ruined!!!!!

I went in to college today to process my film and have spent most of the afternoon trying to figure out what has gone wrong with my negs. They look really dense and of a very different colour to what they usually are, it made me look on the film type as they looked almost B&W. Concerned but didn't ask the technicians. Came home put the negs in the scanner and this is what I get:


Thought first that I must have overexposed really badly but i know for a fact that I had underexposed a few negs by mistake on one roll. I really don't get the disappearing heads etc. because I can see their heads on the negs!!! Really spooky and they are life guards as well!

I feel really really awful as most of the images were portraits and I had promised copies to people. That's the worst, it makes me look so unprofessional, especially towards my contact John in Southend that put me in touch with most of the people that were on those negs. God I feel bad.

Scanned other negs, they are good, so nothing wrong with scanner. It can't be the camera can it? Light leakage would have showed clearly. I can only think it was something wrong with the developer or fix. I want to scream and shout anything to get my negs back but they will off course forever be lost. And I had that thought to hand them into the lab, I wish I had but wanted to save money... Are taking a roll down the lab tomorrow, got half finished roll in camera have to know it's not the film or my camera.
This means that I have nothing to show for my tutorial tomorrow and have more work left to do than I thought. But as always I guess it could have been worse...

More finds along the estuary

I have not got as much photographed the past few weeks as I would have liked much due to the weather. It has been a real washout on the days I am able to go places. Spent pretty much the whole of last Thursday in cafes on Sheppey waiting for the rain to stop, reading in the local paper how the island got more rain in two days than is normal for two months! And Monday was so bad I got really depressed. I love overcast skies but problem is no one is around when it is so wet.

I made a journey to Shoeburyness at the weekend and found an abandoned garrison where kids were playing. I would have loved this as a kid, absolute dream. The kids told me it was haunted by ghosts and this was all part of their excitement. This garrison will very soon disappear and make way to housing development on this former MOD land. I did not really get the picture I wanted so will go back and try again.

I was fascinated by the low visibility, normally one can see the other side very well but when it is foggy it is like starring out at sea unaware of the other sides existence. I tried to make some clean images illustrating this, which I am quite happy with except that I need to scan them better. (My scanner scans some things better than others).

On the beach in Shoebury there was was an African church holding mass. Really different, I spoke to them but they did not want me to take pictures however I had already taken a couple of quick snaps.

I have started to record what people are telling me rather than taking notes which is working far better, I think, but I have yet to put this next to the pictures. I have got small prints made of the images so I can show people I meet while photographing what I'm doing but also to try to see if the images work together and what is missing. I'm really quite worried about edit it all together, I like the process but I also feel insecure.

I will hopefully get to photograph the life boat crew in Southend on Saturday. They are based at the end of the longest pier in the world. I like the idea of this crumbling pier.

It is 6th June today - Sweden's Nation Day, I wish I was in Sweden.

The significance of crumbling paint

Going through some of my old work books, looking for scribbles about Robert Frank, I found these close-ups I took of the Berlin wall some years ago. Our class went there together as part of a project when I did my B.A photography course. I was intrigued by how the crumbling paint looked like maps...and I remember having the word remapping on my mind...

It made me think about the borders project and how fascinated I am about maps, borders, geopolitics. On another trip to Berlin I got a brilliant book 'Wall Remnants - Wall Traces' done by the Brandenburg University. I spent some time walking along the traces of the wall, it would be fantastic to re-trace the whole wall. It's amazing how much is still there.

More places along the estuary

Map of Thames Estuary

On Saturday I took the train out to Leigh on Sea and walked through Westcliffe, Southend and Thorpe Bay. Again the light was to bright for my liking but might have got a few good pics. Often I need to spend time walking around exploring and find out what is there and what sort of light would be good and then keep revisiting places. The busy end of Southend, down by the pier really gave me headache, it was load and brash, full of tourists. Moving past and in to the Thorpe Bay, which is really another part of Southend gave me much more inspiration. In my tutorial with John on Friday we spoke about potentially trying to get more engaged contact with the communities. I luckily bumped in to John Clarks of the Southend Beach Hut Owners Association, a very talkative guy who has lived in the area all his life. As well as telling me all about beach huts, how some of them are over a hundred years old, originally in Victorian times they had wheels and were rolled in to the water, eventually the wheels fell off and today's beach huts were born. Some huts sell for as much as £20,000(!) Other stories were about SS Montgomery an American ship that sank in the channel during the war, full of explosives, engineers has to check on the ship every few months and ships has to navigate around it. There is apparently enough explosives to blow up the whole of Southend or at least all the 500 beach huts! It is possible to see the mast sticking up if one goes out there. He also told me about Mulberry Harbour, a floating harbour that was one of many built in secrecy, in the estuary for the D-day landing but this one got broken in half and stuck in the water. It is possible to walk out to it at low tide, A group of teenagers I photographed earlier had described the big piece of concrete as a shipwreck where they like to go, seems to be the thing to do if you are 15 in Southend.

John has so much knowledge about the estuary and seemed genuinely interested in my project, he also knows a lot of people in the community and has offered to put me in touch with some people among others a local fisherman that he thinks can take me out to the sunken ship etc. That would be brilliant, I really hope this will work out! In 1972 John worked on Foulness Island, digging up and dismantling bombs. The land had been used as a dumping ground from the WWII. This operation was due to the governments plans at the time to build an airport on Foulness, this later got scraped when a new government came in to power and only a third of the bombs were cleared. John said he thought this was very sad, since the idea of an airport there would have been perfect, it would not be flying over any houses just straight in from the sea. This is all new to me and I will do some research. Foulness is furthest out in the Thames Estuary on the Essex side, much of it is MOD land (Ministry of Defence) and can not be photographed, one also need permission to walk on much of the land. I really have to get in contact with people in charge and see if there is any possibility at all for photography and if so what locations. I asked John about this and he said it would be difficult but perhaps easier than some years ago. Again he said he might know somebody.... The best thing about doing this kind of photography is that I meet so many interesting people, it is amazing how much you can learn from them, so fascinating.