Weeks 5 - 11

Due to other commitments during this period I have been focussing on my assignment and not participated in the remaining topics:

Topic 3: VISIONS TO BE WRITTEN (weeks 5-6)
Topic 4: INTERFACING (weeks 7-8)
Topic 5: PRODUCTION (weeks 9-11)

Here are my main ideas:

Transtemporal Milland - Rephotography (repeat photography?)
 
After looking at archival images of Milland in West Sussex, I have been interested in our relationship between our history and daily reality.
Each day we walk past familiar places without realizing the events from the past that occurred in those same places many years before.
While we think of history as something from the past, it can also be intertwined with the present.
 
Erik Kessels Album Beauty is an ode to the vanishing era of the photo album. Once they were a repository for family history, often representing a manufactured family as edited for display.
 
Photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that’s unreal (Sontag, 1977)
 
Every photograph is a fiction with pretensions to truth. (Joan Fontcuberta)
 
Rephotographs challenge historical distanciation because the “then” of past and the “now” of the present become entangled with one another (Melissa Miles, 2016)
 
Why?
I want to create a photo album which is a journey through time centered around what is now the parish of Milland.
 
Audience?
The album will form part of an exhibition within Hampshire Festival of The Mind, organized by the Good Mental Health Cooperative who develop innovative approaches to promote good mental health and wellbeing. People in mental distress often dwell in the past, and because people can be egocentric, they will insert themselves into pictures and construct their own narrative.
The images themselves are a constructed reality of geographically located images, past and present, presented as a coherent whole, not temporally located.
 
Method?
I have gathered archival images from the Milland Memories Group and Historic England. I have also used royalty vintage images from Pexels. My own rephotography images have been taken digitally then blended with original photos in Photoshop to produce a new constructed reality, combining past and present. I have also taken images using a 1956 Leica and black and white film. I have developed and printed these using traditional methods to give a vintage aesthetic to the photographs. I will sequence the images in the album to give a narrative.
 
Sustainability?

Transport: I have walked to all the photography locations. Inkjet paper was collected when passing the supplier. The darkroom printing was done in St Paul’s darkroom Bristol where I was able to get a lift with my partner who was working nearby.
Cameras: Both film and digital cameras were second-hand and purchased prior to the course.
Photographic materials: Film and paper were old stock I already had. All chemicals were re-used. Inkjet paper is FSC certified.
Photo album: Bought from a local charity shop.

Some of the exploration I have undertaken I have decided not to use when working towards my final drafts of this project. Here are some vintage images from Pexels, which although not from milland, I initially thought they could be used as part of my constructed reality photo album.

When exploring layouts for the album I realised that these images were surplus to requirements and the original archive images, along with my own rephotography were sufficient to give the 'family album' aesthetic I was looking for.

I also explored taking the transtemporal 'time travel' into the future using Lidar technology. Here are some examples I was able to download as a form or rephotography.

Although an interesting concept, I have decided this was moving away in a different direction from the realistic look I was trying to achieve with my album and blended images.

While exploring layouts for my blended rephotography images I tried presenting the archival images, the rephotography and the blended images as a triptych.

It was suggested in a webinar led by my tutor that the triptych was too descriptive about the process involved, so I decided to just use the blended images for my final presentation.