As well as my joy in learningI had two other reasons for undertaking the MA at Falmouth, the first to find the language to contextualise my practice like a grown up, the second to decide on which direction I should drive that practice: to find my voice. In this week I finally figured out the latter and have started taking steps towards the former and I feel fabulous, apart from my health, which is desperate to spoil my fun and get me put in hospital, however I am fighting my adhesions in the hope that my sheer force of determination to continue to immerse myself in photography can keep me going!
"So, come on then, get to the point," I imagine you grumbling, "what happened this week?"
This week we looked at constructed photography, specifically those working to tell their own narratives through directing the elements within the frame rather than only constructing it by where they stand, how they frame and later edit etc. This was my week, cos this is what I do!
The break through moment came when, through one of the readings, I was reintroduced to the artist Yinka Shonibare and his work Diary of a Victorian Dandy. I'd been familiar with his more recent work for a few years and the picture I'd seen of the dandy reproduced in several books on photography, however, there within the reading was that photograph and the other $ that ,make up the series. I had no idea it was a series and I saw an instant way of contextualising my series of me in the role of a musketeer. Not only that I now have some where to head to both with his series but in series created by Jan Saudek, Duane Michals, even Hogarth.
I feel thrilled, I have found my starting point, I have jettisoned my need to make large scale projects and I also have an urge to title individual peaces which I haven't done before, all this and it's the only the fourth month of my two year course. I have even more faith that I am exactly in the right place doing exactly the right thing and I feel fabulous, at least, while I can pretend I might not end up in hospital in the coming weeks I do.
Whatever will be will be but after 35 years I have found the place to explore my theatre past and my photography present and in the rest of this module and coming ones I shall be continuing to hone my craft in this regard.
For today, I just want to say thank you to Yinka and the series he made in 1998 that might help others make sense of what I am doing, maybe!
Thanks for reading x
3 from Yinka's series on the left and 3 from mine on the right.
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