Whilst the feedback from my tutor on Assignments 3 and 4 has been very positive, indeed throughout this course, I have nevertheless been thinking about whether there is still anything that I need to reflect upon and address.
So far as Assignment 3 is concerned I think there are two points, both of which I have already addressed to an extent elsewhere. The first relates to presentation of the work. At the time I produced the work I did not give this much thought. Since then I have of course gone on to use the final set for the print on demand exercise and have had actually had the book made up. For the purposes of presentation for assessment I do not now think there is anything more that I need to do with this work and I could simply put the book forward in the vent of physical submission. Whether OCA reverts to this of course remains to be seen.
The other point relates to the development of a personal voice, which was something my tutor and I discussed at some length. This is something that I wrote about specifically at the time (https://markrobinsonocalandscape.photo.blog/2020/04/29/further-musings-on-development-of-a-voice-body-of-work/). I have since continued to think about this issue but I am not sure I have got very much further forward with it. The issue is, I feel, that whilst I do seem to be finding a particular voice of my own, it is at the moment, inevitably, very much tied to the nature of the work required by this module. I have found an aspect of landscape photography that especially interests me and that has produced a recurring theme throughout that I have done so far. Whether I will want to continue in a similar vein once this module has been completed, whether it will feed through into what I do for the next module, or whether I will explore this further in my personal projects (not that I have much time for them at the moment!), I cannot yet tell. For now I have to recognise that I am still developing and there are plenty of other avenues yet to explore.
This actually strikes me as a good thing and that development and change are to be welcomed and embraced. And this leads me to my second general point from the feedback. In previous modules it has been a case of completing an assignment and moving on to the next. To an extent that is perhaps a result of the nature of the earlier modules and the way they have been constructed. The present LPE module comes across to me as more integrated, at least thematically linked and consistent. As a result, each step calls for a reassessment of what has gone before. This, as my tutor has observed, is what I have been doing by going back to look again at the work done for earlier assignments and reconsidering it in the light of more recent work and developments in my thinking and experience. It has felt important to me to consider how earlier work might be developed or readdressed, so that the assignments have become for me, to an extent, not fixed but dynamic pieces of work. This is why I have gone back to each of the first three assignments and done more work on them, in particular with a view to means and modes of presentation. This is probably also what is behind my decision for Assignment 5 to produce two distinct sets of images exploring different ideas about landscape photography.
So far as Assignment 4 is concerned, I do not think there is much more that I can add for now. I still very regard this as an introductory piece, a first look into my chosen subject that in some ways raises more questions than it answers. It would really benefit from expansion and development but I do not see that as a realistic prospect within the confines of the current course. I suspect though that in the future I am going to think more about those further questions as I can see that they might well be relevant to work that I do in the future. Whilst the essay in its current form does not necessarily, at least at face value, fit within the continuum of the work for the previous three assignments, and what I am doing for the next two, I do nevertheless see what the work on the essay has done is affect might broader thinking about landscape and the role of photography as a means of expressing my ideas of landscape.
On a few other points that have arisen out of the tutorial: I did look at Chris Steele Perkins Japanese work in connection with Assignment 2, but I will look at it again with a view to working out how best to present the work for Assignment 6. Shibata’s influence on what I am doing for Assignment 5 is something I have already addressed in writing about research for that project. Otherwise, I will follow up the Mass Observation and Jimmy Forsyth suggestions soon.
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 