Week Seven – Tutorials

A necessarily short post this week, as the Coronavirus global pandemic is starting to impact almost all areas of life, and asking us all as responsible human beings to adopt the actions necessary to contain its spread. For me, although thankfully not diagnosed with the virus (at the time of writing), this means keeping human interaction down to a minimum. I drove from London to Falmouth with some concerns about the wisdom of going to a university campus, albeit not a ‘mass gathering’, but nevertheless in close contact with fellow students, tutors and university staff. In the end I didn’t stay as long as originally intended and got back home to watch the symposium presentations online. It’s a shame because of the networking opportunities, but then again we have to make these sort of personal decisions in the short term to help prevent the spread of the virus.

Before heading to Cornwall, my tutorial with Paul was very helpful. The upshot is that I now need to spend more time answering the questions he posed, and present my thoughts in a proper structure for what will become the script for my Oral Presentation for submission at the start of Week Ten. This work has started and will be in next week’s post.

I had three crit sessions at Falmouth, with Steph and Sarah, then Paul and Cemre, and finally Michelle and Clare. These were my offerings:

I kept the number of images down to twelve, choosing to discard landscapes (as I have shot plenty, am generally very pleased with them, and have received many positive comments from tutors and students alike). I wanted to test my different approaches to portraiture, show a couple of close-up images of the mining equipment, and show recent subterranean images. This reflected my research of a number of practitioners who have shot miners and/or similar such blue collar workers (these include Stephane Lavouie, Ken Hermann, Joni Sternbach, Kjell-Ake Andersson, Nanna Heitmann and Stacy Kranitz). My experiments at portraits have been to try shooting both close-up for intensity, and further away for more context. I like both approaches but recognise I probably need to further develop one style over another.

Shooting in a mine is not for the faint-hearted, and technically it is very challenging – there simply isn’t the space to experiment with different compositional styles; lighting is difficult to get right because it is the combination of a speed light and the beams of light shining from the helmet lamps, all attempted in a very cramped space; and it’s very damp and dirty so protecting the camera body and lens is imperative. But I believe I’ve captured the essence of life at the coal face – the dirt, the claustrophobia (emphasised by the low-slung wooden supporting beams), and the sheer hard work and energy digging in such dreadfully tough conditions. The mining photography work of Earl Dotter (US) and David Goldblatt (South Africa) from the 1960’s and 70’s is especially helpful to me for practitioner contextualisation. So, given all of this, I was pleased with what I presented at the crits.

I enjoyed the irony that these crits were held on Friday 13th! And the actual feedback wasn’t as gloomy as the date might have suggested. Of course asking six tutors for their views inevitably resulted in a wide range of observations and suggestions.

Steph and Sarah concentrated on possible sequencing orders for a book format. They liked the different portrait treatments and both felt that the various styles could be complementary if presented separately (or in a distinct part of a book) rather than interspersed with other images.

Alternatively they felt that one portraiture style could be adopted and then shown alongside other images, with the flow broken up by a page (or two) of text, as indicated by my finger in the image below:

Paul and Cemre felt that I should be more aggressive with my cropping (see image below), to really focus the viewer tightly onto the grubby aspects of coal mining, giving an almost sensual feel to the conditions and equipment – we talked about smell, damp and dirt (all of the things I feel when I look at these images, as I am instantaneously reminded of the conditions that I took the image in), and how to try and communicate these senses. Their joint message was to “use the limitations of space, feel the claustrophobia, try not using flash and not to be too literal in some of my work”.

Both Clare and Michelle talked me through suggested portraiture techniques, with the clear suggestion being to stand back, give the subject some perspective, and not to be concerned about being too close – indeed, to try the latter approach more, as context is everything. I hadn’t appreciated that Michelle had been mentored earlier in her career by the late great fellow-South African David Goldblatt, and she very helpfully relayed to me his portraiture technique suggestions to her from forty or so years ago (something along the lines of “stand back, woman!”). At her suggestion, I now have to research Goldblatt’s work on the Afrikaner community.