Assignments – Page 2 – Holli Kalina

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Assignment:

This assignment is designed to give your tutor a feel for your work and won’t count towards your final grade if you decide to have your work assessed. However, the assessors may wish to see it so that they can gauge your progress across the course.

Create at least two sets of photographs telling different versions of the same story. The aim of the assignment is to help you explore the convincing nature of documentary, even though what the viewer thinks they see may not, in fact, be true. Try to make both sets equally convincing so that it’s impossible to tell which version of the images is ‘true’.

It might be interesting to consider the project as evidence for a court case. What conflicting stories can you make your images convincingly tell? Would it stand up in court? However, you choose to interpret the brief, ensure the images are candid and ‘taken from real-life’. Be experimental and take some risks. Perhaps you could make a list of ideas and choose the most challenging or absurd option to stretch yourself.

Send your sets of images to your tutor by the method you’ve agreed to. Include an introduction of 300 words outlining what you set out to do and how you went about it. Also, send to your tutor the relevant pages of your learning log or your blog URL.

Approach:

When I read this brief I struggled with the use of the word “truth” It suggests that there is only one truth and the alternative is lies. I believe that the world contains many “truths” all of which may be an accurate summary of events but from a different perspective or a different time. Ariella Azoulay (B. 1962) establishes in her work “Civil Imagination – A Political Ontology of Photography” that whether an individual, seen as a terrorist or as a freedom fighter, is merely a judgment based upon the perspective of the observer, or upon the time within which events take place.

In my assignment, I have avoided differentiating between truth and falsehood. Both of the sequences shown are, from my perspective, true. There may be connotations or suggestions in the images that I have subconsciously created within the compositions. I have to leave it to the viewer to take from them whatever they perceive as the truth.

Last month I started a new job, working for a Neil Williams, a landscape photographer based on the Isle of wight. This fantastic opportunity allowed me to be involved in the creation of a new gallery space in the center of Cowes. The building was very dilapidated and required significant physical effort, financial risk, and determination on Neil’s part in order to make it into a functioning gallery, framing and printing space. I took my camera to work over the first month and photographed the preparatory work and the resulting gallery at its official opening.

My objective has been to compare the perspective of those looking at the completed gallery and the pomp of the opening night with the behind the scenes reality of Neil’s hard work to make it happen and to make it a successful business. Both sets of prints are the truth, but the perspectives are very different.