Exercise 2: George Perec

From my bedroom window, I look out onto a communal garden, a car park, and drying green. There are a number of objects visible within these areas, which could be considered as both interesting, and perhaps, less so – certainly from a photography point of view.

Garden

Trees and shrubs, grass, garden bench, detritus, blue skies and white clouds

Car Park

Cars, drain cover, stone chippings, wall, hose, tarmac road,

Drying Green

Clothes line poles, wooden fence, trees and shrubs, concrete slabs

Of course, it’s possible to photograph any scene that is presented in front of you. However, depending on how you photograph it, will ultimately affect how the image is seen, and interpreted by the viewer. This in turn, could affect the photographers intended meaning, so knowing prior to taking an image, or images’, what you hope to achieve, is vitally important. For example, do you want to capture the whole seen, depicting all objects in one frame – though perhaps less obvious. Or, take a series of images’, showing a number of objects in greater detail, in order to paint a bigger picture of the scene you have witnessed.

For this exercise, I actually went a step further, and decided to create a series of macro images’. I wanted to see how easy it would be, to have a better understanding of what the overall scene looked like, based on the individual images’ being presented together. Would the viewer be able to create a bigger picture of what can be seen from my bedroom window, or, are macro images’ – in this instance – inappropriate for the scenario? On reflection, I don’t think it does work. I believe by opting to take macro images’, the intimacy in which I have created, has also formed a sense of obscurity surrounding some of the photographs’. Whilst some of the images’ are more obvious in regards to what is being depicted – despite the close proximity – others are not. I think for this notion to work, I would need to photograph complete objects, rather than ‘parts’ of them. I think the series works best being presented in colour, as some of the objects become more abstruse when viewed in monochrome – which certainly isn’t my intention. I think to help the viewer interpret the scene, text stating what each object is, would need to support each image.      

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