So – a brief insight to my project.

The project has evolved over the 2 months and probably will keep evolving, as I don’t think the project will ever end.

I have kept the initial idea with trees and structures, but the influence of a mixture of Lewis Baltz and Stephen Shore was just too strong. Starting with colour my first impressions were that it didn’t seem right, I was used to black and white and the introduction of colour was almost alien to what I thought would be classed as artistic, but after sitting a couple of evenings over a weekend looking over my images and the above mentioned photographers (accompanied of course with the odd tall glass of something bubbly and cold)  you start to realise there is only one Lewis Baltz, there is only one Stephen Shore, there is only one Ed Ruscha.

I also realised, a little too close to the end of the project (or should I say hand in date), that I shouldn’t put myself under pressure, I should just be out enjoying taking images, enjoy the time in the darkroom producing my prints. Once this happened my work started to come alive, become me and became something I wanted to do everyday. It became easier.

I focused more on colour, looking around and taking images of what people don’t see, the colour and beauty in something that people just look at – they don’t actually see it. People work in these buildings on a daily basis and don’t see the building, or notice the tree or shrub parked right outside. Each structure having its own personality, colour, aesthetics and place on the industrial estate. An estate that is like an island with a band of green fencing it in, a wall of steel clad structures keeping the general public out, yet an access road made to look inviting and appealing to entice you in for a look around, a road system set out just for learner drivers when the workers have left, car parks used by the ladies of the night for one of the oldest professions known to man, a community of dog walkers and joggers on a sunny weekend, a 24 hour island that is watched over by security cameras on every corner, this is a man made world on our door step in every town in every city.

For the basis of this project I kept my focus on the buildings and tried to capture the odd tree in close proximity, the community within the island of the estate would come later over time. I tried to capture all the colours, the similar shapes and aesthetic similarities, the vernacular, the normal everyday building that’s looked at yet never seen until the finished print is put in front of the intended audience.

As part of my research I looked at the framing of the composition, the focus of the image, what was in the composition and what was left out, the visual grammar of the final print “that elucidates the photographs meaning”.

I read a book that blew my mind and helped me to find an understanding of what I wanted in my images. Gave me an understanding of the print just being an object on a 2D plane, a flat static object with edges, a static window with its own dimension, an illusion of a window in to the world I want to show.

I read how the image can give the illusion of depth, be transparent and draw the viewer through the surface of the print in to the images depth. Your eyes appear to refocus and yet it is 2D, your mind refocuses to give the illusion of diminishing perspective, an image with deep depictive space but shallow mental space or vice versa.

Using the frame to corral the content of the composition, giving the image a relationship with the edges of the print, either a passive frame or an active frame. Using vertical and horizontal lines to give stability and tension or diagonals and curves for dynamism and movement.

From this I experimented with my compositions, flat and parallel to the lens, low vantage points for added depth of field, shallow depictive space and deep mental space – adding almost another dimension to my finished images.