Feedback

Had a tutorial yesterday and as usual it made me think.   I am in the process of writing my essay.  Now 3000 word is not the problem.  The problem is making the words cogent and fitting together so that the result works.   Anyway, the tutorial.   This has helped me junk a whole section of the essay, the one comparing Winston Link's work with David Shepherd.   Perhaps not the immediate comparison that might spring to mind but one that I thought had validity.   What I was looking for was a way of examining the meticulous prep that Link did when photographing steam engines.  Shepherd on the other hand didn't.  This wasn't due to any slovenly approach on his part but rather pressure of work and a realisiation that steam engines were disappearing fast.  

Having discussed this with Paul Hill, well argued it with him, I have decided to ditch this section.   First he is probably right, although I am not totally convinced yet it could not have been a valid point.  Second, it gives me some extra space to rework some of the original ideas.  By ditching the Shepherd section I saved 500 words.   Always very useful to have when writing. 

Having discussed this with other members of the course it is clear that we are all slogging through this process.   None of us are enjoying the actual writing but I think we are all gaining new insights from having to undertake this.    However, I am itching to start the real work of talking photographs,  after spending the last few weeks just sitting and listening to other photographers talk about their experiences I just want to get stuck into a practical module.  Still, I need to concentrate on the task in hand and get this essay finish.

More Crewdson Nonsense

Fireflies - Gregory Crewdson

The more I look at Crewdson's work the more I find I love and hate it in almost equal measure.  The hate comes from his corporate work of the last decade.  I just find Twilight and Dream House so depressing and yet so fascinating.   Love him or loath him you have got to accept that he insists on the highest production values for his images.   Note that I don't say for the images he makes because that would simply not be a correct statement.   I have spent sometime thinking about how to describe Crewdson and I think the best way to do this is 'an artist'.   I really do have difficulty seeing him as a photographer.   However, it can equally be argued that this is the point of his work - to be ambiguous and so his input and role are ambiguous.

And then I see the wonderful images contained in Fireflies and again I have to start to question my assessment of Crewdson.  These are a series of images of fireflies Crewdson tried to capture in the summer of 1996.   They are simple black and white images taken at dusk of the patterns left by the fire flies as they fly across the summer vegetation.   They are marvelous.  They look like fairies dancing in the warm summer evening.   Entrancing.   Gone are the obsession with precision and instead we have a more free flowing image of nothing more than white blobs.   They are the better for this.    I have been reading about David Shepherd's attempt to capture the last days of steam in Britain.   He claims that his beautiful oil sketches capture the atmosphere of the time in a way that photographs can't.  I am not sure this is entirely true but it does indicate what Crewdson's later images lack - atmosphere.

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