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Falmouth University MA Photography Projects

from RPS The Decisive Moment - Edition 16 - June 2019

by Documentary Group, Royal Photographic Society

from RPS The Decisive Moment - Edition 16 - June 2019, page 42

Article from: RPS The Decisive Moment - Edition 16 - June 2019

Martin Parr Foundation

Several RPS members have recently completed Photography MAs at Falmouth University. Here we share a selection of images from their Final Major Projects and gain an insight into their experiences.

The flexible online course runs over two years and aims to enhance the creative, critical, and professional skills of practitioners who are at an early stage in their careers, as well as to give those who have already established themselves within the professional arena, an opportunity to interrogate their practice and deepen the quality and sophistication of their creative output. It is designed to accommodate a broad range of practitioners, from those who use photography to question the world around them to those whose practice interrogates the medium itself.

For further information see: flexible.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/ma-photography Instagram: @falmouthflexiblephoto

Daniel Simon

Off Season

I was particularly interested in the MA in photography at Falmouth because the course offered me the flexibility to apply and complete the first half from the Middle East. Although it meant some late nights and very early morning seminars the course staff were more than willing to change one-on-one times to accommodate the time difference. This was also the case when I found myself back in the UK for the second year but working an inflexible full-time timetable. The stand-alone nature of the separate unit portfolios meant that there was no major disruption allowing me to develop my ideas thematically. It was of no matter that the first three were shot on a different continent from the last two. My process journal (danielsimonphotography. blog) gives an insight into how the course is structured and my approach to each of the units.

The overall approach I took, which lasted into the final project, was a largely psychogeographical one. This was borne of the fact that at the outset of the course I was living (as I am again now) in the UAE. I wanted to look at how the country was changing having seen a lot of modernisation over the last decade that I have been here. However, I personally am not fond of the, for want of a better term, NatGeo white-man-among-the-natives approach. There have already been many photographers who have used the manual workers or the desert-dwelling Arabs for stories and there are many very good photographers working within the diverse communities that make up the country. I felt that most of these stories were not really mine to tell, although the story of expat life here is a much longer term and currently ongoing project. Consequently, I chose initially to look at how the modernisation and cultural diversity of the country was reflected in the physical environment, along with the liminal nature of local borders - once fought over, now all but invisible.

One of the things I continue to find is that living overseas brings a strange form of homesickness - known as hiraeth in Welsh - a sort of formless longing for a past and a place that may no longer exist. In my case it was a homesickness for the British seaside, which is interesting as I was raised in the Midlands, about as far from the sea as one can get in the UK. My family background however - I am the first male in my paternal line not to have found seasonal work at Butlin’s, Pwllheli and my maternal grandfather was a Cypriot immigrant who managed a restaurant on Blackpool’s South Shore all through the 60s - might be some kind of atavism here.

Having already developed photographic ideas of liminality (in-between places that are neither one thing nor the other), this seemed an ideal project on my return. Looking at seaside places off-season, and taking a psychogeographical look at the environment rather than directly at the people would, I felt, give me some distance from the great seaside photographers showing in the Greenwich exhibition around the time of my return.

The initial idea was to create 6 zines each focusing on a different seaside resort. However, time constraints and the fact that not all resorts have an immediately noticeable distinct personality changed this to six different liminalities. This was developed through many conversations with people (both locals and visitors) in the places I visited, which I chose to represent as flash fiction in order to be able to develop and, more importantly, distil certain ideas and themes.

In order to ease the pressure of image selection, having visited so many different places, I also developed a concurrent side-project: I eventually (and piecemeal) managed to travel around the entire circumference of Great Britain, which allowed for a more straightforward travel photography approach for many images that I liked but, which might not have fitted into the ideas of liminality I was developing.

My Final Major Project is called ‘Off Season’. I spent the winter of 2018/19 on a road trip around the entire coastline of Great Britain, recording by way of photographs, interviews, and ambient sound recordings what I found. The project reached its apotheosis in a website and associated book/zine featuring images and fictive stories representing the lives of some of the people I met on my travels. Although the MA is now over it is an ongoing labour of love, and I am currently looking at how the liminal lives of people who visit and live in tourist areas off season are reflected psychogeographically in their environs across more of the world. I have covered Benidorm, Venice and currently Dubai thus far.

www.off-season.co.uk

Alexandra Prescott

Trophies

In May 2017 I started the two-year Distance Learning course leading to a Contemporary Photography MA at Falmouth University. As a self-taught pet and wildlife photographer I felt I had knowledge gaps that were holding me back: not the technical stuff but the theoretical and the overall ‘why’ of successful images. Distance learning was a way of fitting in formal study with my lifestyle. The course was hard work, especially balancing everyday practice and life with my studies.

My biggest source of angst, shared by many students, was developing an idea for the final major project:

‘The Final Major Project (FMP) module is the culmination of the preceding two stages of the course, where you have critically examined your practice from three distinct perspectives. It provides you with the opportunity to finalise and produce the critically and professionally informed project that you have defined and developed throughout the Award so far, and to resolve it to a professional and publishable standard.’

It was this quote that helped to define and direct my FMP:

‘Arguably, one of the most important functions of contemporary art is that it may promote critical or even moral discussions among its viewers.’ Barker (1999)

Although it was an intellectual challenge to find an idea that was wholly original, the answer was very close to home. It was inspired by study and resulting experimentation. One of the aims of the course is to encourage you to step outside your comfort zone and then bring the experience and expanded knowledge back as a practice influencer.

My diverse collection of animal artefacts and ephemera, plus the use of chiaroscuro in experimental studio work (a new environment for me as I prefer the great outdoors) provided the inspiration for Trophies. The collection includes antique evidence of our neglect of creature sentience: animal skins, carved ivory, seahorse brooches, animal teeth, bone artefacts. To destroy the collection because it represents misguided past practice would be an iconoclasm and a waste of the animal’s death. Far better to use the remains as an educational tool. This was how Trophies came about.

For my FMP I used 50 images and 28 in the Trophies Installation at the Washington Wildfowl and Wetland Trust (March – May 2019) together with an accompanying zine. The images appear on my website (www.naturalhistoryfineart.com), grouped by Parts, Apparel and Installation.

The course has changed my approach. Photography is now, for me, a creative tool with which I can support and broadcast my beliefs about how we co-exist as one of many species. My images are unique pieces of vanitas style art containing allegorical messages about conservation – what the viewer sees and takes away remains a choice.

Andrew Barrow

Wine Doors of Florence

‘You sure they ain’t religious tabernacles?’ my unimpressed companion questioned. No, the 167 Wine Doors of Florence, the basis for my final project for the Falmouth University MA course that covered these little remnants of history, have no religious connection. They are but wine serving hatches.

They are scattered throughout the city spreading, in a more limited manner, across Tuscany. As far as I am aware these wine doors are totally unique to Florence. They date from the Medici period when a decree allowed producers to sell wine to the inhabitants of Florence direct from their cellars. They were in use right up until the 1900s although I’ve heard some were in use until the 1970s.

How did they work? You came along with your fiasco, knocked on the wine door, paid your money, and left with a refilled bottle. The door opened onto cellars and wine storage rooms.

The wine doors are all a standard size and shape and can indeed be confused with religious shrines or saints’ alcoves. My background research unearthed several photographs of now vanished doors, one of which, dating from the 1950s, was in the main door of a cantina and had been converted into a letter box. So, over the centuries, there have been many more than the remaining 167.

Researching the project with my American collaborator, Robbin Gheesling, required several extended trips to the city. This hardship, one can be assured, was met with grace and determination, with ample support given to the city’s numerous wine bars and eateries. From the several thousand images I returned with, careful selection resulted in the Wine Doors of Florence Folio Presentation box and a pop-up exhibition.

It is surprising how these historical remnants are so often overlooked. People I have spoken to, who have lived in or visited Florence, had no idea of their existence. They are but remnants overshadowed by the other numerous delights of the city. While Robbin was looking at the historical connections between the doors and any existing producer or vineyard, my approach was purely a photographic, artistic one. I was interested in how the doors, now mostly filled in or repurposed as letter boxes or apartment intercom systems, have been subsumed by the passage of time. They now reside unused and ignored or act as a canvas for creative graffiti.

Some of my prints are on display in two Italian wine bars in London (The Wine Place in Covent Garden and The Wine Place in South Kensington) while a larger showing is being planned for Florence later in the year.

Further information on the project, including information on prints, can be found at andrewbarrow.co.uk/winedoors-of-florence.

This article is from:

RPS The Decisive Moment - Edition 16 - June 2019

by Documentary Group, Royal Photographic Society