I touched on this area in my reflection on Assignment 4. In my day job, I am successful or not by how much ambiguity I manage to remove from situations and I think that this flows over into my photography.  I think I am prone to trying too hard to mark my pictures explicit.  This is analogous to the open versus closed writing styles – I would tend to closed writing but this leaves the viewer with little to interpret themselves.  Whilst this would work perfectly in my day job, it isn’t really the outcome that I want to achieve in photography, I want people to make up the story, to fill in the blanks.  I struggle with this though as then I worry that people wont think what I want them to think!  That is the learning though, letting go of the desire to control people’s thoughts seems essential to get to a more open style.

Fact versus fiction is not quite the same as open versus closed but I see it as similar.  Given fiction, by definition is not real, then it would be hard to create fictional images without leaving at least some space given that the real is not there to be photographed.

Perhaps I could blend my approaches using an artist’s statement to accompany images – using a short passage to describe my aims, what I am looking to achieve, but then letting go of control in the images themselves, leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks however they choose.  I read about this technique when reading Short’s book on Context and Narrative (Short,2011:142) and found the idea compelling.

To create a response to the question “where is your departure from wanting / needing to depict reality?”, I had to think for longer than I had expected.  The word ‘need’ struck a significant chord with me as I think this is a deep emotion for me and is what sometimes holds me back.  I speculate to an extent that if I spent more time on the artist statement and thinking about the emotions I wanted to portray rather than the physical instantiation of the idea then maybe my imagination would move away from reality.  During Context and Narrative one of the assignments was related to ‘Photographing the Unseen’.  I chose to photograph a phobia that I have and to date, I think it is my most successful assignment since studying.  This can be seen here.

I did reflect on this at the time, but I feel that I have perhaps lost or forgotten that technique as I strive to get every assignment ‘right’.  The emotion of wanting it to be right seems to draw me back to reality and, paradoxically, away from the fiction or openness that would undoubtably make my images more compelling.

Bibliography

Short, M. (2011). Context and Narrative (Basics Creative Photography). Lausanne: AVA Publishing.