Assignment 5 - feedback

Like Assignment 4, I chose a subject that was particularly interesting to me – Irish migration to London.  However, I learnt from my mistakes from the previous assignment and this time focused on a narrower brief.  This enabled me to produce a stronger set of images and to convey a stronger message.

I chose to tell the story of migration to London by use of the constructed document.  This was a first for me and perhaps my inexperience was apparent in the ways in which I dealt with some subjects in this set of images.  For example, as my tutor pointed out my treatment of some subjects was a little blunt.  Looking back in hindsight perhaps it was.  However, I think I was trying to convey a very blunt, hard hitting message and I feel that this is why I adopted this approach.  I can see now that there are others ways that are equally effective at getting my hard-hitting message across.

I also introduced text to this assignment after some advice that my tutor gave me.  I feel that this element of the assignment was successful and it allowed me to use another form of communication (one which I am more familiar with) to convey my message.  I have found from exhibitions that I have been to that I get more out of them if they have accompanying text.  I like the clues the text can give. 

Moving forward I would like to continue to work on this theme by exploring more the use of landscape rather than the still life.  I think this is something I struggled a little with in this assignment.  I was unsure of just how far I could go which is why some rather dull still life images crept in.  When I ask myself now would the image of the potato on a plate be interesting to a viewer - the answer would have to be perhaps not.  However, the opening image of the Irish landscape scene is more interesting and evokes more feeling or sentiment.  This is what I want to explore further. 

In relation to my use of black and white over colour, I can see the argument for both.  I originally felt that black and white gave an historical context to the images, a theme, which at times was difficult to work with.  I can see the case my tutor presents for using colour and I feel that I would be foolish not to revisit and explore this.

From a technical perspective some of the images were a little dark, a fact, which I have now addressed.  It would seem that my technical skills have improved during the course which is something I feel positive about.  However, there are a few little areas where I feel that I can still improve on and I will continue to work on these. 

I feel that this project was a big risk for me.  It would have been easier to focus on something simpler and employed an easier way to visually tell this story.  I think that taking a risk and stepping out of my comfort zone has paid off.  Perhaps the fact that I chose a subject that I felt comfortable with and knowledgeable on helped a great deal.  The topic was well researched and I had read a lot about it over the years.   More importantly though was the fact that I was an Irish immigrant living in London.  I had made the journey I set out to communicate. 

Moving on, I would like to explore this theme more and take it to another level.  I see this set of images as the start of something that can grow into a major project.  

Assignment 4: feedback and reflections

To try and push myself for this assignment I decided to pick a subject that was of real personal interest to me.  I felt that this would enable me to communicate my ideas more successfully whilst adding a personal touch to my work.  When we look to other photographers we see that their personal projects centre round something that they have a vested interest in.  For example, William Klein’s work in New York, Lewis Hine’s series on child labour or Don McCullin’s war images. 

Adding this subjective element to my work presented a few problems.  As the message I was trying to communicate had an emotional element or sentiment to it I found it harder to pin down.   In hindsight I think that the theme may have been to complex and it would have been better for me to have chosen another subject that was personal to me – perhaps something I had recently experienced.

As a result I lost my way a little and the message I was communicating wasn’t as clear as I had originally planned.  My tutor was quick to point this out and suggested that I could have looked at focussing on one of the themes I introduced in the assignment.  I think my dilemma was that I felt if I had done this my work would have been too restrictive.  Again in hindsight I believe he was right and if I were to redo this assignment I would focus on one of the aspects I introduced. 

Despite all this, I am really happy that I was brave enough to challenge myself to break with my norms and work on a more personally inspired project.   I believe I made some strong statements about life in Hackney by including the place where Agnes Sina-Inakoju was shot dead.  I also believe that I captured some of the essence of life in the borough in Hackney People. 

I think one area where I need to improve in my images is thinking more about my audience and what they will see when they look at my work.  It is clear here in this assignment that what I think is interesting isn’t always the case as my tutor pointed out in my first image for Inner City Living.  Focusing more on narrative will help me move forward.  Avoiding the obvious will help too.  However, I think having a clear message to communicate will provide the best foundation for future assignments. 

Note on colour management:

My tutor mentioned that my colours were slightly off in some of the images and that I should  think about calibrating my monitor.  I’ve been calibrated my monitor for over a year so I was a little confused by this.  I have since spoken to my tutor about this and resolved the issue.  

Assignment 5

Here are the images that I submitted for Assignment 5.  As I wrote about in my brief this assignment focuses on the Irish in London.

Departure

As we left Dun Laoghaire there was drunkenness. The younger men were drunk - not violently so but tragically so, as I was, to forget the dreadful loneliness of having to leave home... For us, as it was then, it was the brink of hell...

JB Keane Self-Portrait (1964)

Tools of the trade – 1

The first wave of immigrants to reach London worked in the services industry mainly as cobblers and tailors.  They were an essential part of the workforce but survived in hellish conditions. 

Tools of the trade – 2

The Irish are best known for their work in the construction industry.  Over the years, the pub was the place to organise ‘the start’ and a few simple tools either borrowed or begged was enough to secure employment.   

Navvies – Building the waterways

Irish workers were in demand from the late 18^th century during the canal boom.  Using spades and picks each cut or channel was dug by hand.  Today there are 2,200 navigable canals and rivers in the UK.  

 Navvies – The men who built the railway

Tramping from job to job, navvies and their families lived and worked in appalling conditions, often for years on end, in rough timber and turf huts alongside the bridges, tunnels and cuttings that they built. In the 1840s there was no compensation for death or injury, and railway engineers like Brunel resisted all efforts to provide their workers with adequate housing and sanitation, or safe working conditions.

Despite cruel exploitation and extreme deprivation the navvies achieved amazing feats of engineering, equipped with little more than gunpowder, picks and shovels.

An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger)

During The Great Famine (1846-51) the Irish population fell by 25%.  One million people died.  One million people emigrated. 

“The famine was a defining event in the history of Ireland and Britain.  It has left deep scars.  That one million people should have died in what was then part of the richest and most powerful nation in the world is something that still causes pain as we reflect on it today.  Those who governed in London at the time failed their people.”

Tony Blair, British Prime Minister 1997

 Cead mile failte

"The Irish hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.”

Benjamin Disraeli

 Living conditions

Due to London's high cost of living, many Irish families frequently shared a single room. In 1849 a  house in Saffron Hill was investigated by Thomas Beames where he found 88 men, women and children living in a single five room house.

Fancy a pint?

“Alcohol is the anaesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.”

George Bernard Shaw 

If music be the food of love, play on

“For you can't hear Irish tunes without knowing you're Irish, and wanting to pound that fact into the floor.” 

Jennifer Armstrong, Becoming Mary Mehan

Be fruitful and multiply

The Roman Catholic Church believes that contraception is “intrinsically evil” in itself.  Catholics are only permitted to use natural methods of birth control.  As a result the Irish migrant population continued to grow until the fear of God and the Church diminished.  

Assignment 5: my brief

My client is the London Irish Centre (LIC).  The centre is based in the heart of Camden Town and looks after the welfare needs of new immigrants to London.  Over the years its work has grown and it has become a ‘home from home’ for all things Irish in the capital.  In 2014 LIC will be celebrating its 60^th birthday and as part of those celebrations they have commissioned me to provide images for an exhibition at the centre.  These images will also be published in a 60^th birthday celebration book. 

The purpose of the assignment is primarily educational.  The exhibition needs to explore the Irish people’s contribution to London looking at how and why they came to the city, the work they did and their daily lives.  Is there a lasting legacy from the first migrants to the city? It should also examine how the immigrants became part of their new society and the challenges they often faced – prejudice, poverty and discrimination. 

In keeping with the celebration of LIC’s birthday this piece of work needs to be a celebration of Irishness and the complex history of immigration to London.  The migrant’s story needs to be told – the positives and the negatives.   The story has to be accurate and informative so both Irish and non-Irish will get something from the images. 

It is essential that the images take on a hint of nostalgia and capture some of the essence of what it is like to leave your home and become foreign.  This project is not looking at the state of immigration today but at the history of Irish migration to London. 

Next steps

After reading the brief I started planning the project in more detail and produced a more specific outline for this work.  I made a decision to use text alongside the images to further enhance the concepts I want to communicate to the public. 

These are the themes I set out to explore:

·         The New Departure.  Leaving home, the home that was left behind. 

·         Tools of the trade – tailors and construction workers

·         Building the country’s infrastructure – canals, railways and roads

·         Famine and the potato

·         Drinking culture

·         Music and the craic

·         Prejudice

·         Religion

In addition to the images I decided that text would accompany the images to enhance the narrative.  The text would come from a variety of sources including song lyrics/poetry to political quotations.

 

I chose not to include people themselves as subjects in my images preferring to focus on the aspects of their lives and their belongings.  I felt that this would enable me to build a better picture from an historical perspective.  Without people, there is a sense of timelessness to the images.  They are harder to date.  I also felt that I could focus the viewer’s attention would be distracted by people and modern settings. 

In line with this, I chose to produce a series of black and white images.  I felt that the historical setting I wanted to create would be better achieved in monochrome.  Our history books are full of black and white images and I wanted to copy that effect. 

By avoiding the use of colour I feel that the viewers will be better able to focus on the subjects.  I want to create a dark mood in the images and I feel that black and white will better equip me to do this.  Colour can evoke moods and I wanted the images and the subjects to be able to stand alone and be more hard hitting. 

Another point is that colour fades with time like our memories and when we reflect and look back on our lives we rarely see events clearly with every colourful detail. These images are presented in a form of flashback to the past, the viewer is shown a series of memories from the past.  

Update - back on track

Due to some personal issues I've had to take a break from the course for a number of weeks and as a result my blog has been a little neglected.  However, I am back on track now and have started work on the final assignment for People and Place.

As it stands I have a couple of choices on themes for this assignment.  I could look at one of the buildings I photographed for assignment 3 which would be interesting to revisit.  I had thought about the Tate or The British Museum or maybe even the underground.  However, I feel at the moment any of these could turn out to be a bigger project than I anticipated.

I could also explore some of the themes I looked at in Hackney like art or crime or my family.  In my last assignment I particularly enjoyed exploring my family and thinking about how different my life would be if my parents hadn't returned to Ireland and I had grown up in east London instead.  What kind of person would I be today?  At the moment I think I am being drawn to looking more at my family and my father in particular.

I would like to explore him and his place in my life a lot more and find the idea of using photography to do this interesting.  As he died when I was young I know very little about him only what I have been told.  I have often said to people that only for photographs I wouldn't even remember what he looks like.  So photography has sustained and instilled a series of memories of my father in me.  I think this is a very uniques relationship to explore using photography.

Assignment 4: A sense of place

I chose the borough of Hackney in east London for this assignment.

Inner City

Hackney Life

Quirky Architecture

It's still life

Crime and punishment

For art's sake

Assignment 3 - feedback

Overall this assignment was successful but it wasn't as strong as the previous two assignments I submitted.  I'm not sure why that is really.  Perhaps it was down to this particular assignment and the fact that I struggled to shoot indoor spaces.  I felt the assignment was overall frustrating to carry out.  It was very difficult to avoid taking pictures of buildings that looked like tourist snaps.  It was also difficult to find locations where I could shoot indoors.  It was also difficult to focus on so many buildings.   I felt that I didn't have the time or the ability to do my chosen ones the justice an in depth treatment of an individual building would give. From looking at other students blogs I was not alone in finding this assignment challenging.  It seems that many other people struggled with it too.

However in saying that I believe that I would tackle the subject differently if I was to do the assignment again.  The benefit of hindsight always is a wonderful thing!

My tutor made comments about my use of an overly wide angle lens and the fact that the edges of the pictures lacked sharpness.  I think my major mistake with this assignment was trying to get as much as I could into the frame hence the reason why nearly all have been shot using an extreme focal length.  I think this probably arose from me trying to avoid cliched shots or touristy ones.

Feedback on specific pictures is detailed below.

The Geffrye Museum
These images suffered as a result of shooting with an extreme focal length.  It was suggested by my tutor that I look at the work of Peter Fraser to discover a different way to explore the relationship people have with places.  I have looked at Fraser's work and posted my thoughts here.

Tate Modern
Although I have used the wide angle better for these images some would have benefited from a closer angle like the image shot in the tanks.  My tutor also suggested that I looked more at landscape shots for some of the images as with the portrait style I chose there is a lot of empty/dead space as in the image below.

British Museum
My tutor found these to be the most interesting of my shots.  He suggested that I pay more attention to what people are doing in the frames.  Most cases the people are moving towards the camera and it would be interesting to hang around awhile and see what I could get of the people actually milling around.

Covent Garden
I felt these were my weakest shots and my tutor's comments reflected this. I agree with him when he said they looked a bit hurried.  Looking back I believe I did rush them and this can be seen in the final images.

London Underground
My tutor said that these pictures were very different to the others I submitted and that they provided an interesting dimension to my assignment.  I personally felt more comfortable in this environment to explore more hence the resulting tilting angles.  While I was doing this assignment I shied away from shooting passengers up close.  I think this is something I would like to try in the future but it is very difficult to do.  My tutor suggested I look at the work of Luc Delahaye and Bruce Davidson.  I have looked at this and I have found them interesting.  The images are very close up and at times the commuters look a little weird.  I think I would be interested in shooting people that are asleep etc commuting to work.

Overall I have learnt quite a bit from this assignment.  I am looking forward to moving on the next assignment and finding a new space to explore.

Assignment 3 - A sense of place

Here are my images that I submitted for assignment 3.  

The Geffrye Museum

Tate Modern

The British Museum

Covent Garden

The Tube

Preparing for assignment 4

I have been thinking about my next assignment recently.  As I live in London I thought about focusing on a specific place or borough as suggested in the brief.  At first I considered choosing where I live in Enfield but this I though would be too easy an option.  I then considered the Lee Valley area but after some initial research I found that it was just too big an area and would be too big a project for this assignment.  However, I feel it may be something I could focus on in the future.

It was after a visit to home in Ireland and a conversation with my mum that my thoughts turned to Hackney.  Last week I attended a talk by Tom Hunter which increased my interest in the area.  The east end of London is a common stomping ground for street photographers but from what I have seen they usually tend to focus on Brick Lane and surrounding areas.  I thought what about Hackney - the real Hackney.  Or should I say what Hackney means to me.

My parents came over from Ireland in the 1950s and started married life in the east end.  I'm not sure why this area was chosen perhaps because of more affordable rents and less anti-Irish sentiment.  During that period it is reported that signs with the words 'No blacks, no dogs, no Irish' were found in B&B windows and Irish Need Not Apply was often on job advertisements.  My mother says she never came face to face with this and I wonder if this was because she lived in the east end where there is a tradition of immigration.

My dad worked in the construction industry and I wonder if he was more exposed to this sentiment.  If he was he never shared it with my mother.  Unfortunately he died when I was young so I have no way of ever finding out.

In the late 1970s the opportunity to return to Ireland came about and my father jumped at the chance.  I was the only one in my family to be raised there and have not experienced living in the east end like they did.

In 2005 I got my first job in the public sector at City and Hackney PCT.  I was based in Kingsland Road which is in Hackney and is close to boundary of the City of London.  My job brought me into contact with people that lived and worked in Hackney and one thing I got from them was a sense of pride in their community.

For my assignment I would like to explore London's east end in particular Hackney.  I would like to visit the places where my parents first lived, where they shopped and the places they socialised.  I would like to portray a sense of place from the information I have got from my mum.  This could also be part of a journey to getting to know more about my dad and the life he lived that I know little or nothing of.

Assignment 2 feedback

Overall the feedback I received for this assignment was positive.  My tutor said that I had a good eye for capturing the perfect moment for a photograph but that more work was needed on my shooting discipline to get backgrounds and framing perfect.

I feel that my choice of lens for this section of the course contributed to the background problems.  It is difficult to get the balance right in being conspicuous and choosing the relevant gear.  However this is something I will continue to work on moving forward.  I feel that only with more practice and experimentation will I find a set up that will be the most comfortable for me.

He also mentioned avoiding visual gimmicks in the future instead relying on the power of the content of the image to relay a message.  Again I am pleased to have this feedback because up until now I have been unsure of how far to go in post production.  My gut feeling and the images I myself like the most are those that look more natural and tell a story rather than are heavily manipulated in photoshop.  Maybe this is a lesson I need to learn and rely more on my own judgement.

Images that were highlighted were

Marching Soldiers

My tutor said that I had captured the action at the decisive moment in this image.  The key element being the foot.  He compared it to an image of Reni Burri where the woman's heel is the key element.  He mentioned the fact that the flagpole is coming out of the Sgt Major's head but that was being picky.  I was pretty restricted movementwise for this shot.  If I was able to move I may have been able to compose so the flagpole was better placed.  

Tour de France

This image highlighted the problems of the backgrounds in the set.  Although my tutor did say that this was a superb capture of expression.  

I have looked at cropping the shot which I think improves the composition but I could have made a better job of the shot at the time of shooting.  I think this is where practice will really come in.  Until I started this part of the course I underestimated how quick you have to be to get these images!

Child Soldier

I personally like this shot, but it does have problems in the background like in many of the other images I have taken for this set.  De-saturating parts of an image is generally frowned upon by the professionals so it is something I should avoid in the future for this type of photography.  

My tutor suggested converting to black and white which is what I had originally done -again I should have listened to my gut instinct.  

On the plus side my tutor said that this image together with the majority of my submission is very well seen and just needs a little tightening of technique to reach an excellent standard of street photography.  This feedback I really do value and it means I am on the right track.  I think all I can do now is work harder and practice more.  

Assignment 2 - People and activity

For this assignment I chose the Lord Mayor's Show as the subject.  My images are below.  

F