OCA informal meeting of students in the South West

M5 Somerset : photo made without my looking through the viewfinder

Thanks to Teresa Milk from Torquay who arranged a meeting of students at the Royal West Academy in Bristol. This is how at 10.30 a.m before the gallery began to fill up, 7 of us (3 men, 4 women) found themselves around a table sipping away at their bevvies and chatting.

The RWA in Bristol with Charity, a statue installation by Damien Hirst, standing outside

I was not sure I would be able to come until more or less the last minute. I had also had reservations about meeting in an art gallery. I am not one of those photographers who wants their work to be taken seriously as art rather I would like it to be accepted as photography; "photography for photography's sake!"

no sign for photography magazines !

Before I arrived at the gallery, I dropped into Smiths, the newsagents, and was struck to see there was no actual mention of photography in their extensive shelves of magazines; the current term is "imaging". This further stirred my concerns about photography as a medium.

a piece of art work in the academy that did interest me!

What would the day be like without a tutor to give some input? It was slightly haphazard as we lost each other on more than one occasion but the RWA is not a big place and there was a natural gravitation towards Papdilo, the cafe there!

Tutors in fact were one topic of conversation. Are they really worth the course fee? Do they earn their keep? It seems tutors do vary quite a bit in the way they respond to their students. There was a feeling that tutors do not go in for personal communication with their students over the practicalities of doing a course and personal issues the students might be facing over caring for a senile parent for instance. Tutors can also be rather brief when commenting on the work of students. Personally, I have got on fine with the tutors I have had although one did send me an introductory letter for a course different to the one I was doing!! I find it has taken me time to get into the mode of studying again.

A part of the course is keeping either a log book or an online blog. At first, I found the software difficult to handle and still find Blogger a bit tricky. Wordpress can be a good alternative; this software is available for download and so one does not have to be online all the time.

Tutors had another criticism thrown at them concerning their criticism of contemporary artists! Martin Parr is a leading UK photographer yet gets criticism as does the doyenne of landscape photographer, Charlie Waite. One can find oneself accused of being too commercially orientated rather than producing one's own work and finding style rather than borrowing it. This strikes me as a bit of a conundrum. I remember once being criticised for producing commercial images that were being used to advertise a holiday; I did not tell the photographer that I had actually made the photographs before the idea came up for the holidays and there were also in black and white, not a usually a choice for for holidays. The photographer happened to be well known and widely respected so I took the criticism on board in a kind of respective way but found myself questioning it too. I guess if you have a Marxist outlook then anything that looks like it might sell is considered inappropriate.

One topic that drew me to the day was UVC (Understanding Visual Communication) a course that I have considered doing. This sounds really interesting but I wonder about studying Mark and Freud; what about Darwin whose thinking is becoming more relevant as science continues to verify his theories? Both Mark and Freud have been discredited by those who have followed in their footsteps. UVC seems intellectual though and not really in tune with the more intuitive approach of photography which happened thanks to scientific theory not aesthetic theorising. Liz Wells writes, "Theory informs practice." yet without practice there would be no theory. Still, UVC is clearly a fascinating line of study and as a photographer I feel the need to understand theory to some extent.

Reading around one's topic can be rewarding even if one does go off at tangents thanks to the mass of available information on the internet.

The Landscape module of photography might seem attractive yet it is also demanding. One needs to photograph the same location at different times of the year and even different times of the day which can be very time consuming.

OCA student informal meet at the RWA: students from left to right -
Theresa and Dorothy then Ushma, Peter,  Sally? and David.

As the conversation continued, I got up and walked around the room to look at the large format inkjet prints on the walls of buildings at night from different places around the world; the cost of one print was £320 and there were a couple of signs to inform one of this but no sign containing the name of the photographer although a man at the entrance to the museum selling tickets to the exhibitions did mention it to me.

sign for The Ballroom Spy exhibition

There was one exhibition I did want to see since it was about dance, a subject I have covered quite extensively in Asia, and also because it also contained paintings of dance; it was interesting to see photographs and paintings hung in the same gallery as part of the same exhibition since the dialogue between these tow art forms has always interested me, largely as a way to define my own photographic practice.

The exhibition was called "The Ballroom Spy" and was about ballroom dancing and the world this particular form of dance encompasses. A lady on duty at the exhibition told me that the two were good friends and admired each others work; in fact, the artist Jack Vettriano uses the photographer's images to paint from. The photographer Jeanette Jones is a trained dancer herself and uses this knowledge to help her make images that relate to particular points in the dance moves.

HABITAT - a chain store that is closing !

the rear view of Charity by Damien Hirst - coins spilling from the collection box
could be seen around the base of the statue and on the pavement outside 

I started my blog at a cafe further up Whiteladies Road