Final Major Project budget plan

Final Major Project timeplan

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
9am-12pm	Personal time	Shoot/organise work for FMP	Professional futures work	Shoot/organise work for FMP	Shoot/organise work for FMP	WORK	WORK
12pm-1pm	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch	WORK	WORK
1pm-4pm	Personal time	Process/edit photographs from morning shoot	Professional futures work	Process/edit photographs from morning shoot	Process/edit photographs from morning shoot	WORK	WORK
4pm-7pm	WORK	Process/edit photographs from morning shoot	Professional futures work	Process/edit photographs from morning shoot	Process/edit photographs from morning shoot	WORK	WORK
7pm-8pm	WORK	Dinner	Dinner	Dinner	Dinner	WORK	WORK
8pm-10pm	WORK	Personal time	Personal time	Personal time	Personal time	Personal time	Personal time
10pm-12am	Personal time	Personal time	Personal time	Personal time	Personal time	Personal time	Personal time

Final Major Project proposal

BA (Hons) Photographic Arts                                            

MAJOR PROJECT PROPOSAL

This should be a clear, focussed and coherent proposal for the major project that you intend to produce in Semester 2 and should give the reader a clear sense of what the project will involve when read alongside the pilot project.

Please extend boxes as required (500-1000wds)

Name           

Madalaine Nevzat

Project Title (or working title)

For my working title I will choose the youngest and oldest age of the girls/women that I am going to photograph – e.g. XII – LXX (if the ages were twelve to seventy).

Subject / Concept

(What the project is about?)

In this project I want continue and expand on my pilot project, and explore the idea of ‘change’ and ‘transition’. In my pilot project I documented my younger sister and her transition between youth and adolescence. I was interested in how her innocence was quickly being replaced by puberty and the accompanying pressures of being a teen. I want to expand on this by exploring women all different ages that have had to adjust to change, e.g. widows, loss of child or family member, dealing with cancer and other illness, and documenting other major changes that may occur in their lives.

Aims

(What do you want to achieve?)

I hope to be able to capture and convey these different narratives within my photographs through portraits and still life images.

Context / Audience

(Where will it be seen / who is it for?)

As I have broadened my subject, and am not focusing solely on one person, I feel that the audience of my photographs will broaden also. I plan to present my work within the context of ‘wall’, although I would like to take images that work within the ‘page’ context too. Exhibitions do not last forever, therefore I feel that the context of a book is vital when it comes to photography, as it provides a physical existence once the exhibition is over, and makes photographs more accessible to people all over the world and not just within one gallery space.

Proposed form, medium, presentation

(How will you execute it and present it?)

As I feel comfortable and confident with working with medium format camera and film, I feel it is relevant and necessary to use this for my Final Major Project. Detail and quality are also an important factor for this project as I am planning to exhibit the results in A2/A1 size; therefore shooting on medium format will also allow me to achieve these results.

Research report

BA (Hons) Photographic Arts

Module: 2PHO627

RESEARCH REPORT FORM

This should be a summary of and a critical reflection on your research process so far. You should try to give the reader a sense of the process you have been through - your journey, your thoughts and decisions along the way and what has informed the choices you’ve made. Try to be as honest and as critically reflective as you can.

Please extend boxes as required (length 1000-2000 wds)

Name           

Madalaine Nevzat

Major Project Title

(Or working title - how and why did this title develop?)

For my pilot project I chose the title of ‘XII’ meaning twelve, as it was the age of my sister as I was photographing her; I want to carry on this theme for my Final Major Project and for my working title I will choose the youngest and oldest age of the girls/women that I am going to photograph – e.g. XII – LXX (if the ages were twelve to seventy). I originally chose this as my title as I felt that age was very important within my project, particularly at the age of twelve, many changes from childhood to adolescence begin to happen; therefore, I feel it is important to carry on this theme. As I have chosen to broaden my subject for my Final Major Project, to photographing a range of ages instead of just adolescence, I feel that the development of my work will be parallel to the development of those that I am photographing.

Research Methods

(What methods have you used during this phase of the project and how have they helped you develop your ideas and inform your major project proposal?)

My main method of research when I first started the project was visiting many different galleries and exhibitions, to draw inspiration from current, as well as older photography work. I firstly visited the National Portrait Gallery to view the 2013 Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, which I found greatly inspiring for my pilot and major project; I found two pieces of work there by photographers, Patrick Fraser and Ilona Szwarc, that have helped inform my project both aesthetically and conceptually. After visiting this exhibition a second time, I was fascinated with another piece of work by photographer Dorothee Deiss, titled The Twins, which won fourth place in the competition. The photographed pictured elderly identical twins laying together on a bed in their bathrobes; this photograph gave me the idea of stretching my project further from adolescence and expanding it to photographing all different aged women within the theme of ‘transition’.

Once I had a rough idea of my project title and what it was that I wanted to photograph, I visited a very relevant exhibition at the Photographer’s Gallery, titled ‘Home Truths: Photography, Motherhood and Identity’. Viewing this exhibition really helped to inform my ideas for the project; I felt the theme of the work was very similar to my own and I took inspiration from the ideas, as well as aesthetics, especially from a photographer named Fred Huning.

I used the university’s library facilities a lot for this project, searching through books and the online library catalogue for relevant visual, conceptual and contextual references. I found this facility extremely helpful, as I was able to spend time flicking through as many books as I needed, drawing inspiration from the style, technique and sequencing of other photographer’s work. The internet was also a major resource for my research, however I find that I gain a lot more knowledge by physically looking through a book or exhibition, therefore, whenever I found a photographer that I was interested in online, I would use the library to search for their book, which I was then able to take home and read.

I also visited the British Library to look at books that were not currently available at university. I found this facility very helpful as it gave me an opportunity to view the books of photographers that were very relevant to my project, such as Melissa Ann Pinney and Jocelyn Lee; however, I found it very different to a normal library and the downside to this research resource was that I had to request the books that I wanted to view 48 hours before visiting as the library doesn’t provide them on shelves to browse through freely. This meant that I had to organise and plan my visit a few days in advance and also know exactly the material that I wanted to view.

I also searched the websites of different culture and photography magazines/archives such as Feature Shoot, The Guardian, Magnum photo etc,

and visited many bookshops to flick through magazines, books and journals to take inspiration from other artists.

Pilot Project

(What have you achieved through the development of your pilot project/s? What have you learned from the process? Identify the main concepts that might direct or drive your major project.)

Through my pilot project I feel that I have gained a greater understanding of the documentary style of photography; I discovered that I must constantly be observing my subject in order to capture the perfect photograph, as in documentary photography, that moment can never be recreated. I feel I have learnt a great deal about lighting and it’s importance in documentary photography, as large lighting kits cannot always be set up, especially when shooting outside on-the-move - therefore it is extremely important to shoot at the right time of day and capture the daylight perfectly.

The main concepts that I feel I will take from this pilot project to drive my major project is the idea of ‘change’ and ‘transition’; I really enjoyed researching, studying and photographing females and documenting the physical as well as psychological transformation from childhood into adolescence, but I also want to expand this further by photographing a larger age range of women, and their ‘transformation’.

Audience and Context

(Has a consideration of Context and Audience made you think about your project in a particular way? Have you been aware of the histories, conventions and audience expectations of particular contexts? Have you considered different contexts and how have you responded to them?)

When initially starting my project, I knew that I was interested in creating a body of work that would be suitable for the context of ‘page’, however, as my project has developed and I have researched more into the conventions and audience of different contexts, I feel that my work would also work well, if not better, in the context of ‘wall’.

When I was taking my photographs, I was constantly thinking of which shots would work well together on the wall and how they could be presented in an exhibition. I really like the style of diptychs within the same frame on the wall, which is what I wanted to create for my own work. Although my final prints were framed in quite a small frame (10x8”), for my Final Major Project I want to work with really large prints such as the size of A1 as I feel the detail that you get from printing this large is so much more rewarding and complimenting to the photographs.

I also experimented with the context of ‘page’ for my project, and although I prefer my photographs within a gallery environment, I also feel that they would work well within a book form. Exhibitions do not last forever, therefore I feel that the context of a book is vital when it comes to photography, as it provides a physical existence once the exhibition is over, and makes photographs more accessible to people all over the world and not just within one gallery space.

Production and Presentation

(Discuss the production methods you have been exploring through your pilot project. What effects do these different approaches/ visual strategies have on the work?  What choices have you made in the refinement of your visual approach and why? Is the approach you have chosen effective in communicating your ideas to the identified audience?)

For this project I chose to shoot on a medium format Fujifilm rangefinder camera, as I knew I wanted to shoot on 120mm film but I also wanted a camera that was suitable and not too heavy to carry around for documentary style photography. I feel that detail that medium format film gives really compliments portraiture work and gives much more detail than 35mm.

I chose to present my work as diptychs in the frames as I feel that the images tell a story when paired together, as well as a whole new narrative when together as a collection. I presented the photographs in quite small frames because I want the viewer to have to lean in and examine the photograph to discover and unfold all of the different aspects and suggestions that I am trying to convey. I refined my images down to 6, as I feel it is these images that portray my idea the most effectively.

Visual References / Bibliography

(List the key visual and critical references you have explored during the research process. Discuss how useful these references were for the project and what you learned from them).

The key visual references that I have explored during this project, was the work of Jocelyn Lee, Melissa Ann Pinney and Hellen van Meene. I also discovered the work of Lillian Birnbaum much later into my project, but I still feel that her series titled ‘Transition’ links to my own project greatly. I found the essays that accompanied the work of the photographers listed above in their photographic books to be very interesting and helpful within my own research and ways of photographing.

I also studied Roland Barthes ‘Camera Lucida’, particularly his chapters ‘The Winter Garden Photograph’, ‘The Little Girl’, and ‘The Family, the Mother’. I found Barthes opinions interesting, however, I also felt the urge to challenge his views and disagree with a lot of his statements. 

Evaluation of Pilot Project

Overall, I am very pleased with the work that I produced in the project. I feel that I captured some good shots which presented and suggested the change and transition that my younger sister is going through at the moment; however, I feel that my work would have benefitted greatly if the project was over a longer period of time, in order for me to capture her transformation into adolescence over the period of a few years.

I learnt many things over the course of this pilot project, one being learning how to use new equipment, as this project enabled me to experiment with using a Fujifilm medium format rangefinder camera, which I found perfect to shoot with as it was much lighter than the Mamiya, and smaller and easier to use outside and on the go. I also became much more aware of lighting and learning to use it to my advantage, in order to avoid the use of artificial flash.

I feel my strengths in the project came from my relationship with my sister, and being close enough to her in order to take personal photographs of her life and development, which she would otherwise be self-conscious about. I also feel my camera control and editing skills were a large strength in this work, as I was pleased with the final results of my images.

I feel my weaknesses in this project were not shooting enough material, however, I found it hard to find suitable times in the week where myself and my subject would both be available for at least 4 hours/the whole day to shoot. As my photographs are not staged and posed, it was important that I made my sister feel comfortable and relaxed first by spending a few hours with her alone without my camera before shooting. It was important that I captured many different aspects about her and her change, therefore I tried not to limit the time that I would spend shooting her to less than 2 hours, as otherwise this wouldn't give me enough time to capture many different aspects of her daily routine; however, daylight was an issue and therefore I tried to keep all of my shooting time between 9am-4pm.

I would really like to develop this project further if given the time, as I feel over the course of 2 years I could create some great images that would work well for this series and suggest the transition into adolescence. Although my idea for my Final Major Project has developed and change slightly from this pilot project, I am still going to continue with taking images for this series in my own spare time, and continue forward into my FMP taking the skills and strengths that I have learnt from this pilot project.

My work in the context of 'wall'

Here I experimented with having my images in frames as though they were in the context of 'wall'. I really like the simplicity of the black frame with the white border, and feel that the shots would work well if they were printed in a large size - e.g. A1/A2. I also want to experiment with putting two images together within a frame to create a diptych, as I feel that some shots don't work as well as others when presented alone, and will create a better narrative if placed in pairs.

My work in the context of 'page'

I wanted to experiment with what my images would look like in the context of a book. I used the website blurb.co.uk in order to create, design, composite, and make my own book using my photographs from this project. I am really happy with the result and think that my images work really effectively within a book format.

I was going to experiment with having my photographs presented in diptychs on each page, however, I feel with a book you get so much more detail and benefit from having the images larger all on one page, which is what I did here.

Edited shots from shoot three - Cropped, adjusted levels & curves

Selected shots from shoot three

I feel that these shots are very important within my series as although they may be controversial,  they tell a huge story when viewed alone, as well as create a whole new narrative when placed with the rest of my shots. They are very voyeuristic and personal, and I debated about whether using them in my final edit, however, I think that they portray my idea greatly and show the realities of the transition from childhood to adolescence.

  

The dolls in these two photographs, I feel, represent the clinging onto childhood and playfulness that my sister still contains, but is slowly losing. I thought that there was something quite sinister about the dolls, their faces and the way they all look identical; it reminded me of Ilona Szwarc's series 'American Girls' that I studied earlier in the project, as each doll is dressed differently and can be customised, yet all of them really look the same. I feel this irony is very important for the subject area that I am portraying, as 'identity' is a large concern for young girls, yet they are being presented ideas of what is considered 'perfect' which they will continue to compare themselves to for the next couple of years.

This photograph is a metaphor for many things within my series. The water connotes change, motion, renewal, reflection and transformation. The sky/clouds connote concealing/revealing, dreams, doom and gloom, oppression, as well as change and transition, but also hold the optimistic metaphor "every cloud has a silver lining". I feel that this image would work well within the series and also help break up the shots of objects and portraits. When editing this photograph, I want to adjust the levels and curves in order to make it slightly brighter as I feel it is a lot darker compared to the other images that I have taken in my series, and would aesthetically fit better into the series if the exposure was slightly brighter.

Overall, I am pleased with these shots from my third film. I believe they will work well within the series to stop the entire project being only portraits. I want to experiment with using these and my other photographs as diptychs and see which ones work the best when paired together.