Assignment One: The non-familiar – Tutor Feedback

As my tutors report can be found on my blog, I won’t repeat what has already been written, but will however, reflect on some of these points further and mention topics that have not been included that I believe to be important for my development.  

Overall, I’m very happy with the feedback I received and felt my tutor appreciated my efforts in regards to approaching and photographing strangers – a task I was genuinely nervous about. He did mention that the series seemed “a bit snapshot in places” and I appreciate and fully understand where he is coming from in regards to this comment. By including the castle in the portraits’, they could be mistaken for a photograph a tourist would take of a friend, or family member, for example. However, as the castle was an important factor within the images, to help with the overall theme of the series – ‘tourists’ – I’m not entirely sure how I could have made the portraits’, less like snapshots.

We discussed ‘terms’ used to describe certain groups of people – in this instance ‘foreigner’s’ and ‘tourists’ – and how, as photographers, we need to be careful with the terms we use if writing about them. I found this to be an incredibly interesting and helpful discussion, as not only did I appreciate that some people might not like to be called ‘foreigner’s’, as this could have negative connotations of them being ‘invaders’ of some sort, it also made me realise that I could extend my search to those, for example, who may be from different parts of the U.K.

My tutor felt the portrait that worked best within the series, was that depicting the two Korean gentleman. He liked that one was holding a selfie stick, which had strong connotations of a ‘tourist’ and their style of clothing helped reinforce the idea that they were indeed from Korea, meaning the GPS coordinates that I used, may be irrelevant in this instance.

Though, it was agreed that using GPS coordinates was irrelevant and didn’t bring anything extra to the portraits’, we did discuss how these could be used effectively in a photography. It turns out my tutor created a project exploring the theme of disused mine shafts in the U.K. In this instance, he used GPS coordinates to locate these mineshafts, where he then created grid references for a more accurate location.

A topic I wanted to discuss during my feedback session, surrounded an image by Niall McDiarmid, which I discovered when doing research for this assignment. It depicts a women, wearing all orange, working at a stall selling oranges. I wanted to find out if there was a specific term for this photography style, but my tutor wasn’t sure. However, he mentioned that when you photograph someone in their working environment, it’s called an ‘environmental portrait’. This was a term I had never heard of before, but is something I will do further research in to.

We also had an interesting discussion about the value an image has to the photographer. For example, are they creating images because that subject will benefit them financially, or, are they doing it to generate social awareness about that subject?