Lower the flag, sound the bugle.  

I have now received feedback from my tutor on Assignment 6 so LPE is effectively now finished.  The final step is to prepare for assessment in March next year (and I am nearly ready for that) so this will in all likelihood be my final post on this course.  Although I am producing a submission document to go for assessment I am not proposing to make it public and post it here.  So here is the final feedback:

“Overall Comments

(RM: Congratulations on completing the course.  You have produced thoughtful and engaging work throughout.)

This final assignment of the module, although from my own point of view not the best work I have done (although I am not entirely unhappy with it) has been an extremely useful exercise in a number of respects and to an extent serves to tie together much of the work that I have done over the course of the year and has helped to develop and established some of my views about the concept of landscape in photography.

Feedback on assignment 

This has worked well.  The regular and disciplined approach, photographing every week throughout the year, as opposed to a mere handful of times, has clearly paid dividends and has meant that the locality has been well observed, has had close attention paid to it.  Your preference is for the view to the east, if only because of the slightly wider view as the burn downstream and the road diverge.  You also queried whether the sequence actually works better without the soundtrack, although the choice of music seems to work well, which led into a wider discussion about the combining of images and sound generally.  I remain slightly equivocal about the use of the music:  it was certainly a useful exercise to find something suitable and to engage with the composer directly to obtain permission for its use; I can though also see that the flow of images alone has merits.  I drew a, slightly paradoxical, comparison with the music of Morton Feldman which unfolds over lengthy stretches of time with apparently little change from moment to moment, interrupted from time to time by more noticeable changes (Rothko Chapel and String Quartet II in particular) which is what the sequence of photographs does.  In both cases the nature and extent of the changes and development is only apparent from the overall arch of the work.  I can also see there is a danger of the soundtrack dominating or imposing a particular significance on the images, although I do not feel that is a problem here.

In passing, in connection with the use of sound, we touched on the technical difficulties involved with matching the different media, and the awkwardness of Lightroom as a tool.

We nevertheless agreed that sound and image can successfully be combined.  As an example of this I pointed to the recent work of Japanese photographer Masao Yamamoto whose book Sasanami is paired with music by Akira Uchida:  the different media are presented so that the book can be viewed separately from the music or in combination with it, leaving it to the viewer/listener to make their own variable combinations of experience.

Coursework

Work throughout this module has clearly been affected and to an extent limited by Covid.  Paradoxically though the limitations have actually proved to be quite liberating and have opened up a more developed and richer view of what can be achieved with landscape photography, and what is worthy of being photographed, focusing more on a limited locality and paying closer attention to what is there to be seen, no matter how apparently, objectively insignificant.  This more mindful and attentive approach has coincided with and been nourished by a deepening of my Buddhist practice, which has turned out to have a significant impact on how I have approached this work.

Here we also touched on the influence of, in particular, the work of Rinko Kawauchi and her approach of taking apparently random and unconnected photographs of mundane, every-day, easily overlooked things but then through judicious editing and juxtaposition finding new themes, correspondences and meanings, something that I want to explore further.  (Off at something of a tangent, we also touched on the appeal and influence of other “anti-aesthetic” Japanese photographers, such as the Provoke group and Masahisa Fukase’s Ravens, whose work I have not sought to emulate, largely simply because from a purely technical point of view I am not sure how they achieved their effects.)

These limitations have also meant that I have very much made the exercises and assignments my own, developing my own interpretations of and approaches to them – developing my own voice – and immersing myself in the medium more than might otherwise have been the case

Research

(RM: Research is your strong point; a high level of enquiry which informs your practice and reflects your deep literacy of the medium.)

Learning Log

The log remains full and varied.  If anything, looking forward to assessment, my most difficult task is going to be in editing down the material that needs to be presented.

Pointers for the next assignment / assessment

Much of our discussion focused on how I should prepare for and present my work for assessment in March.  Considering a number of options, the most attractive seems to be to produce a sort of narrative, with links to relevant blog posts, exploring my experience of the course and how it has helped with the development of my voice, how the assignments have fed into each other.  We agreed that although I will focus on assignments 2, 3, and 5, plus the essay, the first assignment is still worth mentioning as it developed some ideas that fed into the later more substantial works. My learning from the technical aspects of using film, particularly in Assignment 5, is worthy of inclusion.   I should also add a note about my interactions with fellow students and the much greater importance to me of looking at and reacting to the work of other more established artists.  

So far as the next module is concerned, we briefly discussed my preference for Self and The Other: how this is another  that at one level I do not necessarily really want to do but how it is important for me to take on something challenging (it will no doubt be affected by continuing limitations as a result of Covid) so that, hopefully, I will get more benefit from it, as I have with landscape, which I was not initially that keen to do but nevertheless chose in order to take me out of my comfort zone.”

Turn off the lights.