Assignment 5: selection and sequencing

I printed out the 20 ‘yes’/’maybe’ images from last editing attempt and took them away on holiday with me, in case inspiration struck. As it turned out, I only got the images out to look at once, in my hotel room in between visiting exhibitions at the Arles photography festival. My edit on that occasion is below.

I confess, I ran out of steam/inspiration at this point and put the prints away for the rest of the trip. I think seeing hundreds of other photographs at a couple of dozen exhibitions was a tad overwhelming.

OCA North meeting

I took the prints to an OCA North study group meeting. It’s a cross-functional group and this time there were three photographers and two drawing students.

We spent quite a bit of time reviewing my images and first of all editing the 20 down to 15, then working on a few different ideas for sequencing.

I found this exercise enormously useful, particularly on the sequencing side. Other people bring their own ideas and viewpoints, and I came away with lots of options that I wouldn’t have come up with on my own.

One aspect I found particularly interesting was that the drawing students looked at the images in a slightly different way to the photography students – more in terms of formal qualities such as colour palette, lines, shapes, even textures.

In terms of a sequence, we considered images in pairs and groups of three, in terms of both matching and deliberately separating similar images(to provide a kind of rhythm to the sequence). I explained that the loose intent was for the sequence to resemble a walk around a particular area, being reminded of things along the way. One idea that arose from this was to make the subject matter move from more urban to more rural – this injected an element of narrativity that was previously missing.

Big thanks to Helen, Kay, Lynda and Andrew for their time and advice.

Current edit

Following the above meeting I have replaced one of the above images and swapped two places but maintained the gist of the overall sequence. Below represents my current (maybe final?) A5 edit.

Next steps

I’m planning to draft up a set of 15 images in what I believe to be the final A5 presentation format, for discussion at the next student hangout.