Yet more thoughts on Assignment 4.

Following a very interesting telephone conversation with my BOW tutor a couple of days ago I have been rethinking my work for assignment 4 yet again.  Assignment 3 had been about walking and I wanted to continue that theme into assignment 4 this time through woodland.  Initially, although I had included images of footpaths disappearing into the distance I had focused on romantically idealized close up images of natural phenomena that I encountered on my walks defaulting to my 'Eliot Porter' style.  When I presented these images to my peer led hangout group the work was, not unnaturally severely criticized, one member of the group expressing shock that I had abandoned the footpath work.  Having reflected on this I went out and looked for less comfortable, more edgy and darker images to balance the idealized ones and perhaps work with them in pairs.  I had also, at this stage converted all images to square format in order to achieve some uniformity as they were a mix of horizontal and portrait format.

 My tutor, like my peer colleague who I had shocked by abandoning the footpaths felt that this should be the way forward as it was walking that was my focus.  He also liked the square format, not only for the uniformity, but it distanced the work from the picturesque somewhat as it moves away from the golden ratio.  He also mentioned the 'Black Square' of Kazimir Malevitch.  Referring to the images that I had already used on the blog Rob liked the fact that there was a calmness to them and he was particularly attracted to the subtle muted lighting.  He liked one or two images that seemed to have 'holes' at the end of the path and they allowed the viewer to question what was through it.  I also feel the same way when the path disappears round a bend or through some undergrowth - it allows the viewer to ask where the path leads; there is no resolution to the image.  He felt that the images would suit a print presentation and he felt that I should avoid leading the viewer on a walk through the woods - no narrative in the series.

I decide to look back through the many images that I collected while working on this body of work and was surprised at how many 'disappearing paths' I had.  I am obviously seduced by paths disappearing into the distance.  I have gathered all of these images together and edited them down to a possible 30 that I would need to edit down further to between 10 and 15.  The next stage is to print these images (included below) onto plain paper to help with the editing process.