Formative feedback
Student name
Alan Fletcher
Student number 515735
Course/Unit Context and Narrative
Assignment number 2
Type of tutorial-Written
Overall Comments
Well done on this new work Alan. It must have required leap of faith to take your ideas in this so personal and difficult a direction. I think that the collaboration between you and your wife works very well.
Assignment 2 Assessment potential
I understand your aim is to go for the Photography/Creative Arts* Degree and that you plan to submit your work for assessment at the end of this course. From the work you have shown in this assignment, providing you commit yourself to the course, I believe you have the potential to pass at assessment. In order to meet all the assessment criteria, there are certain areas you will need to focus on, which I will outline in my feedback.
Feedback on assignment
Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Quality of Outcome, Demonstration of Creativity
You manage to balance your own internal recollections or equivalents of your experiences on that day with your wife’s outside-looking-in experience. I like the form and conversation that you created between the alternating types of contents.
You have managed to anchor the images a little through leaving in hints of the domestic environment and then taking them through into increased abstraction and ambiguity. They start out with a sense that they could have been connected by what you saw through your own eyes on that day, but then suggest that sight (as we experience it) become supplanted by a visual landscape that does not conform to any norms and, therefore, neither do your images. The words are much more reported and accessible and provide an effective counterpoint to your images. The text clearly reveals that two people shared the experience and that the experience itself was very disturbing and demanding.
I feel ambivalent about the image of the use of the clay figure at the end of the sequence. On one hand you did a healthy range of tests to explore if, or how, the figure might feature in the assignment so that was very positive and it does in a way help to punctuate the sequence and bring the viewer back to your earlier content. On the other hand the work now takes a particular co-joined direction that is shared between you both and offers a rich account and impression of a difficult time, so I’m not sure what the figure adds as it introduces a new dimension which I don’t think is needed.
With regard to the presentation of the work I would make a couple of suggestions. The only way that I can see the work is to scroll up or down the sequence of images. What jumps out immediately is that you shift alternatively from portrait to landscape, which is visually jarring so do think about this. At first I quite liked the switching from the blurred images into a solid black panel and the particular choice of typeface. After repeated viewings I wondered if this could be improved. You could try different variations of typeface and its placement in the frame. Maybe even try out hand written words to connect it further to a personal and diary-like form. You might even consider if the work might look better with subtle shifts of colour and tone behind the words. In this way the two forms of images could be interconnected. Like I said above please check your grammar and spelling in each panel.
Coursework
Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Demonstration of Creativity
Good engagement in set coursework with some stimulating responses through your own photography. I like the work using the mirror and the surface being disturbed – this should be taken forward in your own time.
Research
Context, reflective thinking, critical thinking, analysis
Your writing is rich in that you are clearly searching for the best way of theoretically anchoring the work and - I think of this as being very positive - that you are searching for ways to talk about the psychophysical trauma of the event at the center of the work.
You seem very anxious to not totally pin down the potential meaning or reading that the work could stimulate. Personally I would leave the interpretation aspect of the final work open. These things are never simple, for instance when I think about the impact of an artist like Jo Spence who very directly applied her photography throughout her treatment for cancer. The direct way that she made it clear that her work was about both her own direct medical experience of the disease (therefore to a degree cathartic) and the capacity of photography to give insight open up debate on an otherwise difficult subject. She also developed her influential theory and practice of phototherapy. Likewise, the portraits of a photographer like Nicholas Nixon can be another example of the image moved away from aesthetics and across to very taboo subjects such as extreme illness and old age. Both of the people above use the evidential capacity of photography and the images shock and reveal something culturally challenging about being human and being vulnerable. They both use a constructed method to their portraits – whether autobiographical or taken of another subject. Your work is quite different in that it is retrospective and approached after some time after the event. As you say you are exploring the event as you both recollect it and you are aiming to give an impressionistic form to something that was emotionally and physically experienced. The strength in your work is the exploration of experience from two different positions and the concept of exploring he importance and experience of a short period of traumatic time.
A book that I think you should read is Rexer’s The Edge of Vision. Whilst is does not align exactly to this new work and the ideas that underpin it does offer an excellent survey of artists whose practices use the abstract qualities of the photographic image and outlines their reasoning. As the heart of your work is concerned with the visual equivalence of an epileptic attack I’m not certain how much the purely aesthetic understanding and appreciation of visual abstraction might interest you, but as a student you should immerse yourself in this type of reading.
In your supporting writing you generally mention Postmodernist writers, but you do need to say more than this. Which writers are you referencing in particular and what did they add to your research and thinking.
Learning Log
Context, reflective thinking, critical thinking, analysis
As you say in your supporting materials you will need to think carefully how best to submit the work for assessment. Unfortunately I do need to remind you again to check your writing thoroughly. This applies to both the background materials and in the texts in the work itself. In the text sections on black there are a few grammatical errors – I wasn’t sure whether you were conscious of these and that you tried to capture your wife’s own words, but they do stand out in otherwise what is an articulate piece of work. It was very positive to see the evidence of your various experiments carried out during the developmental stages of the assignment. Assessors like to see this underpinning work and to read your accounts and reasoning of what worked and what didn’t and of course why.
Suggested reading/viewing
Context
Lyle Rexer, (2009), The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photograph, Aperture
Strengths
Areas for development
Much improved documentation of developmental work
Essential to check and proof read for grammar and spelling
Growing appetite for anchoring the work in theory
More precise references needed to connect the work to contemporary practices
Good conceptual grounding of work
Tutor name
Dr. Andy Langford
Date
23.06.2018
Student name
Alan Fletcher
Student number 515735
Course/Unit Context and Narrative
Assignment number 2
Type of tutorial-Written
Overall Comments
Well done on this new work Alan. It must have required leap of faith to take your ideas in this so personal and difficult a direction. I think that the collaboration between you and your wife works very well.
Assignment 2 Assessment potential
I understand your aim is to go for the Photography/Creative Arts* Degree and that you plan to submit your work for assessment at the end of this course. From the work you have shown in this assignment, providing you commit yourself to the course, I believe you have the potential to pass at assessment. In order to meet all the assessment criteria, there are certain areas you will need to focus on, which I will outline in my feedback.
Feedback on assignment
Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Quality of Outcome, Demonstration of Creativity
You manage to balance your own internal recollections or equivalents of your experiences on that day with your wife’s outside-looking-in experience. I like the form and conversation that you created between the alternating types of contents.
You have managed to anchor the images a little through leaving in hints of the domestic environment and then taking them through into increased abstraction and ambiguity. They start out with a sense that they could have been connected by what you saw through your own eyes on that day, but then suggest that sight (as we experience it) become supplanted by a visual landscape that does not conform to any norms and, therefore, neither do your images. The words are much more reported and accessible and provide an effective counterpoint to your images. The text clearly reveals that two people shared the experience and that the experience itself was very disturbing and demanding.
I feel ambivalent about the image of the use of the clay figure at the end of the sequence. On one hand you did a healthy range of tests to explore if, or how, the figure might feature in the assignment so that was very positive and it does in a way help to punctuate the sequence and bring the viewer back to your earlier content. On the other hand the work now takes a particular co-joined direction that is shared between you both and offers a rich account and impression of a difficult time, so I’m not sure what the figure adds as it introduces a new dimension which I don’t think is needed.
With regard to the presentation of the work I would make a couple of suggestions. The only way that I can see the work is to scroll up or down the sequence of images. What jumps out immediately is that you shift alternatively from portrait to landscape, which is visually jarring so do think about this. At first I quite liked the switching from the blurred images into a solid black panel and the particular choice of typeface. After repeated viewings I wondered if this could be improved. You could try different variations of typeface and its placement in the frame. Maybe even try out hand written words to connect it further to a personal and diary-like form. You might even consider if the work might look better with subtle shifts of colour and tone behind the words. In this way the two forms of images could be interconnected. Like I said above please check your grammar and spelling in each panel.
Coursework
Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Demonstration of Creativity
Good engagement in set coursework with some stimulating responses through your own photography. I like the work using the mirror and the surface being disturbed – this should be taken forward in your own time.
Research
Context, reflective thinking, critical thinking, analysis
Your writing is rich in that you are clearly searching for the best way of theoretically anchoring the work and - I think of this as being very positive - that you are searching for ways to talk about the psychophysical trauma of the event at the center of the work.
You seem very anxious to not totally pin down the potential meaning or reading that the work could stimulate. Personally I would leave the interpretation aspect of the final work open. These things are never simple, for instance when I think about the impact of an artist like Jo Spence who very directly applied her photography throughout her treatment for cancer. The direct way that she made it clear that her work was about both her own direct medical experience of the disease (therefore to a degree cathartic) and the capacity of photography to give insight open up debate on an otherwise difficult subject. She also developed her influential theory and practice of phototherapy. Likewise, the portraits of a photographer like Nicholas Nixon can be another example of the image moved away from aesthetics and across to very taboo subjects such as extreme illness and old age. Both of the people above use the evidential capacity of photography and the images shock and reveal something culturally challenging about being human and being vulnerable. They both use a constructed method to their portraits – whether autobiographical or taken of another subject. Your work is quite different in that it is retrospective and approached after some time after the event. As you say you are exploring the event as you both recollect it and you are aiming to give an impressionistic form to something that was emotionally and physically experienced. The strength in your work is the exploration of experience from two different positions and the concept of exploring he importance and experience of a short period of traumatic time.
A book that I think you should read is Rexer’s The Edge of Vision. Whilst is does not align exactly to this new work and the ideas that underpin it does offer an excellent survey of artists whose practices use the abstract qualities of the photographic image and outlines their reasoning. As the heart of your work is concerned with the visual equivalence of an epileptic attack I’m not certain how much the purely aesthetic understanding and appreciation of visual abstraction might interest you, but as a student you should immerse yourself in this type of reading.
In your supporting writing you generally mention Postmodernist writers, but you do need to say more than this. Which writers are you referencing in particular and what did they add to your research and thinking.
Learning Log
Context, reflective thinking, critical thinking, analysis
As you say in your supporting materials you will need to think carefully how best to submit the work for assessment. Unfortunately I do need to remind you again to check your writing thoroughly. This applies to both the background materials and in the texts in the work itself. In the text sections on black there are a few grammatical errors – I wasn’t sure whether you were conscious of these and that you tried to capture your wife’s own words, but they do stand out in otherwise what is an articulate piece of work. It was very positive to see the evidence of your various experiments carried out during the developmental stages of the assignment. Assessors like to see this underpinning work and to read your accounts and reasoning of what worked and what didn’t and of course why.
Suggested reading/viewing
Context
Lyle Rexer, (2009), The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photograph, Aperture
Strengths
Areas for development
Much improved documentation of developmental work
Essential to check and proof read for grammar and spelling
Growing appetite for anchoring the work in theory
More precise references needed to connect the work to contemporary practices
Good conceptual grounding of work
Tutor name
Dr. Andy Langford
Date
23.06.2018