Project Evaluation

For this project the theme was encounters, experiences and meetings. I thought of various different ideas to do with this theme. For example family events, crowds, conflict, relationships and growing up. After thinking about the different ideas, I decided to explore the theme of war and past time experiences. 


Within our overall project I worked on another theme of life cycles. I explored the work of Bill Viola and Andy Goldsworthy as their work related well. I liked the way Bill Viola made a film expressing the three stages of life. Andy Goldsworthy's work focused on using the natural surroundings and natural tools to create his work. Following my own ideas of on life cycle, I shot a film roll of gravestones. I think that gravestones depict the idea of life cycle well as at the end of a life is death. I chose my two best photographs then mounted them onto foam board and entered them into the Rotary Club Photography competition. 


For the project encounters, experiences and meetings I explored war and past time experiences through going to the Imperial War Museum and looking at my family history and relatives. I looked at the works of Don McCullin, a photographer. His photographs were exhibited in an exhibition in the Imperial War Museum. I love how he captured the moments within the various war and conflict scenes. As I could not experiment with my own Don McCullin inspired photographs I looked at other artists that I could show experimentation for. Rankin was one of the artists that I explored with my own experimentation of his rankin 'destroy' work. I took photos of myself expressing different emotions then 'destroyed' them in various ways. I experimented with cutting into my photos and adding objects and backgrounds for the images. I then used my experimentations in photoshop to explore different ways of 'destroying' my images.
I looked at the work of Maurizio Anzeri as his work linked well to mine as he involved old vintage photographs in his work. His style was sewing over the faces of the different people. Before I experimented with sewing into my photos I thought I would find it quite daunting to edit and change the faces of my family. After sewing into my photographs my thoughts of sewing into them changed, I found it interesting and experimental to see the effect it had on the photos. To explore my theme of war and past time experiences I experimented on photoshop with 'ageing' my photographs. I added different effects until I was happy with the outcome.  For my final piece I was originally going to make a memorabilia box including different photos and records from the war such as medal certificates and death records and objects from my family such as old dolls. After thinking of how to present my idea I decided to have a mounted sheet of photographs and records with the attachment of a box containing various different objects. I am happy with my final outcome as I think it is presented better than my original idea. I would like to explore the theme of war and past time experiences through a range of different idea and may bring elements of it to new themes and ideas.