Category: Experiments 2

Assignment 2: Alternative Final Set

Having started to think about the strengths and weaknesses of the first final set that I have chosen, as discussed in my last post, and about other ways in which this project might be presented, I have come up with another set.

The last set was very much based on the visual experience of being on the train and experiencing the journey through the window, observing the landscape as the train passed through it. For an alternative approach I have put together a more varied set describing the journey itself, from boarding the train to getting off, as a more abstract experience. A number of images have been carried over from the previous set. Some have come from the attempt at a text based set. I have though added a few new ones from the first shoot. Again, I have tried to highlight the contrast between country and town, this time adding a bit more emphasis on the build up of residential areas as the train comes into town. I have also hinted at the presence of other train traffic as one approaches Newcastle: the ante-penultimate image is of another train crossing the King Edward VII bridge into Newcastle.

Whether this is better I am not sure. It is at least more varied from a visual point of view. I can see an almost infinite number of possible combinations of the pictures that I took for this project but this one will do for now and at least I think it works.

Assignment 2: Mapping

When I first started to think about this assignment I initially rejected the idea of doing anything with maps as unhelpful given the nature of the journey I wanted to depict. Whilst that view has not changed I have nevertheless come back to the role of maps, not as an inspiration or means of arriving at the subject matter for the project, but more as an outcome of the project, as an artefact that is itself the result of working through the assignment.

This has largely been the result of reading an article on the Magnum website about the work of Alec Soth who produced maps, not in order to make his various books, but as a result of having done so. Soth is of course one of the artists that I referred to earlier in connection with photographic depictions of journeys, though explicitly not one who influenced my thinking or choice of subject matter in this case.

What I have done for this is scan an OS map that shows the route between where I live and the city of Newcastle, blown it up, and reprint it. Onto this new copy I have put thumbnails of the images I have chosen for the final set, indicating where on the map they relate to.

As it happens this is the only OS map that I have that covers all of this area and it turns out it is thoroughly out of date, going back to 1971! Most significantly what has changed in the interim, for the purposes of this project, is the line of the railway itself, though that is admittedly hard to see in the photo below. It now runs along the south side of the river as far as Gateshead and then crosses the river over the second up-stream bridge marked on the map into Newcastle. Back in 1971 the line crossed the river at Blaydon and ran along the north side of the river, following the route of an otherwise long disused line that ran along that side from Wylam, where there is still a very fine bridge that now serves only pedestrians and cyclists. (There are plenty of other differences, such as the absence of the current dual-carriageway version of the A69, and of the Metro Centre, which has its own dedicated train station. These are though not really relevant for the purposes of this assignment and would really only mean something to anyone who knows the area now.) I like this map though because it has a distinctive style that the OS no longer uses which is much sharper than the modern versions.

https://www.magnumphotos.com/theory-and-practice/desire-lines-reframing-american-road-trip-narrative-alec-soth-rebecca-bengal/?utm_source=shop+newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=280120+button&mc_cid=9ba521d022&mc_eid=5ae4cfc0d6

Assignment 2 – An attempt at a text-based version

Looking over the contact sheets I made following the second shoot for this assignment I am not sure they entirely work. Firstly I do not think I have quite enough good quality material: it turns out it is much harder than I anticipated to get a clear shot of the moving-light display. Nevertheless there are enough in order to be able to put together at least an attempt at what a better set might look like. Doing a reshoot, unless doing the whole thing from scratch again, would I suspect be quite difficult. I can already see from this first attempt that getting a sufficient degree of consistency is quite difficult, so I am not sure how well images from two or more shoots, put together, would actually form a harmonious whole.

It is also evident to me that a mix of the platform display and the on-train screen does not really work. For this experiment I have therefore stayed with just the on-board images for the sake of consistency, concentrating on the names of the stations through which the train passes. One accidental by-product of this is that all the images shared the same dashed light strips. This is significant to me for two reasons. One is that they recede into the background and in doing so point in the direction of travel, giving a pictorial, though static, impression of movement. The other is that they call to mind the sprocket holes on 35mm film negatives. I shot these digitally rather than on film but I think the effect is that the pictures carry within themselves a marker of their own artificiality, a self-referential reminder that this is a series of photographic images.

I have also taken one image out of the order in which they were taken, the last one in this sequence, as it seemed to offer, without having planned or intended it, a sense of the end of the journey. The first image in the sequence again just seemed, serendipitously, to form an appropriate starting point.

Thinking about presentation, as with the Sublime set for Assignment 1 my initial thought is that again a slide show arrangement might work quite well, the melding of one image into another adding something of a sense of movement. I will experiment!

Assignment 2 – Second contact sheets

I managed to go into Newcastle by train this morning so took another sequence of experiments for this assignment, this time concentrating purely on text. Here are the raw contact sheets.

I still have to go through these in detail and edit them but my immediate reaction while putting these sheets together is that a short sequence based on station names might work. I will see what it looks like over the next few days.




Assignment 2 – First contact sheets

At last I have got around to organising the pictures I took a couple of weeks ago on my first foray into this assignment, all 160-odd of them! Here are the contact sheets (fourteen in total), unedited and unprocessed. It is striking how much repetition there is, perhaps not surprising as much of the route is rural and along the river, and how long the train sits at each station. I had not realised until now that the train is only in each station for about a minute but a minute and a half for the Metro Centre, probably because it is the busiest stop along the route.

How I am going to distill a usable set from this lot remains to be seen!