Rachel Brown // Work Review

This friday we had a group tutorial with Rachel Brown. Rachel is an artist and is currently working on a solo show. As well as being the photography director of Harpers Bazaar and Town & Country.

This was the first time I had met Rachel as I didn't make it to her last review so I took recent work, and also a few from Term 1 so she could see my project from the various approaches I have done throughout both Terms so far.

As it was a group tutorial, it was also interesting listening to the feedback she gave on others work as well as my own, and overall was just interesting to sit with and listen.

She gave me some great advice on the strengths of my project and what is working, and also areas to develop and experiment with, which I'm sure to take note of and follow in the next coming weeks.

The talk also got me thinking of the final exhibition and what images I include and different ways in how they can be displayed. An example she gave was to display them in old style frames, following this was advice to visit the 2nd hand outdoor market thats on a Thursday in Huddersfield. So this is on my places to visit when I get the chance to have a look and see what I can find. Even if not for my project, it may just be an interesting place to visit and see what's there.

Also suggested was displaying them in an album which I will take into consideration also, as I also would like to create a photo book to go alongside this project. Also looking at the images, she also spoke of how comfortable my Grandma seemed to be with me photographing her and this coming through the imagery. This is an interesting point as if anyone else were to take photographs of my Grandma she would hate it and most likely wouldn't allow it, so therefore, with me having the advantage and relationship with her to be able to take such photos, is more motivation to do it. 

She also picked up a few themes that was coming through the work so far:

• Looking at ageing through relatives
• Use of an existing archive
• Creation of my own archive of my Grandmother that can be kept in years to come

View Rachel's work here

Adrian Davies // Talk

Adrian Davies came in to talk to us this week. As well as doing his own practice within photography, he is also interested in the photo book. His work has been exhibited and published in numerous locations, as well as gaining experience he has also been a Lecturer at Leeds.

Throughout his talk, he spoke about his own practice. From photographs, to using google maps to produce a project. He said his love of the photo book correlates with his love of photography and both of them go hand in hand with each other. His google project consisted of travelling virtually to different ikea shops placed in different parts of the world.

(at first, he considered whether using google could be classed as photography, however, he said that if he were there, he would take the same picture as he captured virtually so there is little difference other than the object you are using. Also Google maps is constantly updating and changing so it's still the user that constructs the image)

This were a really interesting project that he is currently still working on. Through looking at the same shop but in different parts of the world its starts to become unclear where the shops actually are due to there very similar exterior. He did also progress onto going into ikea and photographing various aspects also, so it was a mixture of the google imagery and photographs. This is still a project he is currently working on.

This reminded me of a project I worked on in my first year, where did a similar thing. I used Google street view for the project and visited Mcdonald's and Hard Rock Cafes around the world which is a similar concept. Maybe one day, I might revisit this project and see how it may develop now.

This talk was an interesting insight into his own work and processes and the development of the projects he has worked on. Below I'm going to list a few points I've taken away from the talk:

''Use your intuition - respond to things you feel like you need to. You may not know what or why your attracted to something but just photograph it''

''Embrace accidents, and also embracing bad techniques can sometimes work in your favour''

''Keep shooting even if you have no place for it''