Recent activities

I realise I have not been updating this as much as I possibly could recently so thought I would add something about what I have been working on lately.  Today being the last day to finish the 1st draft of my MA dissertation means my head has been in the books recently but I have been trying to get out and about to shoot and find new and interesting locations for later shoots.  One thing I have been expressly looking at is the sports areas flood lit at night.  I’ve visited a few of these now but have to find one that is going to be appropriate -either the flood lights are insufficient to allow me to make a useable image or there is nowhere from which I can get a suitable vantage point.  I swear with my current quest to find high ground I feel like a sniper half the time.

One thing that has become clear over the past few weeks of shooting and looking at work for my paper on contemporary practice, I am becoming more and more interested in the periphery of spaces.  This idea has been addressed before in Mark Power’s 26 Different Endings and Steffi Klenz’s (of Nonsuch fame, a series that heavily influenced my Thames Town work) A Scape.  Both if these bodies of work concern the edge of the city of London, Power in regards to how we artificially create borders and Klenz in an examination of the nature of a space in flux.

What I am interested in with this periphery concept within leisure spaces is how we have a more fluid relationship with the landscape.  These spaces are less about the commoditisation of the land and present more of a balance between man and the land.  However when we dig deeper we see that this is still a highly managed landscape and our relationship is still one of dominance over all.

Shooting wise I have also been revisiting spaces now that it is November and officially the off-season.  Ever sonce first picking up a camera I have been obsessed with the notion of a landscape virtually abandoned during the winter months with only the remnants of a vibrant summer industry left behind.  Never sure that the images I capture of this are not overly cliched but if nothing else there is something both calming and poignant about photographing something so familiar when so far from home.

This leads me onto another point about my work that has become more focused and resolute in my mind.  By attempting to a China so different than the manufacturing giant depicted in the western news, or the mystical historically rich ideal of the travel books, my work is attempting to comment on globalisation and homogenisation of culture, how in the 21st century the global culture means that the land is shaped in much the same way no matter where you are based and it is only in the small details that we can see references to individual cultures coming through.  Those spaces that are altered by groups of people and not by industry are the spaces where we will be able to truly observe some level of individual culture.

On a technical note it has been difficult to add images lately because I blew a harddrive and as such have to redo all corrections on my film based work.  I knew I should have burnt the back up disks last week…  It also meant I lost 95% of the digital work I shot in China but I am strangely calm about this and find if anything it actually to be a freeing experience.  The only images I truly rated I have A3 sized copies available of and the rest to be honest were in two modes -a form of diary of my initial time here, annoying to lose but lets be honest, I would have never even converted the RAW files anyway (I am not and never have been one to shoot in this way before or after my first 2 months in China -I just have no interest in photography outside of using it as a method to explore my ideas.  I guess this is a family thing because there are relatively few snapshots of us from my childhood when compared to the horrendous experience most we are subjected to when other families pull out the photo album).  The other lost pictures were just my initial explorations, all of which have led to the work I am doing now but form only the basis of the initial ideas.  That they represent the desire for me to leave behind the more reportage style for the time being would have been interesting to look at again but overall their loss feels almost like a weight has been lifted -the sum of my work in China will rest in that which is on the physical artefact that is film.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 16th, 2008 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Killing Time. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.