Pretty much as the title states, this post is going to be all about my initial plans and how the global pandemic has affected the way I have had to continue this body of work from creation to presenting it.
PLANS
It's no secret that when it comes to photography I'm mad about film. Everything from the emulsion, to the cameras, to the developing and printing process. It's the small things; the sound of a shutter being cocked; how every camera feels, looks, acts, and sounds different, even instances of the same model feeling distinct in the hands as if they have their own unique character and personality; the unexpected results that sometimes happen in a darkroom; the joy of spending a lot of time and effort on a roll (or many) of film only to have to wait to see the results. Everything about it makes me giddy from excitement. That is all only a part of why I wanted to use cine film instead of a digital projection however, a lot of my concept is about trying to create a lot of atmosphere and emotion whilst also putting my dad into the landscape, this as a way of trying to convey both how I feel when I'm on these walks, and how my dad feels hearing about them or remembering the times before his illness when he could experience them himself. I feel the cine film not only creates an enticing atmosphere with its flickers, scratches and warm glow of light, drawing you in before you can even see whats happening with the whirring of the reels turning like a sirens song begging you to come closer and inspect it, but it puts a lot of both myself and my father into this project in a very tangible and real way. This technology is what my father grew up with, and what a lot of my viewers will have grown up with, so there's this link to a time full of memories and brimming with nostalgia, which is what a lot of the emotions I want to get across in this project consist of. My father's memories of the place, the nostalgia for the days when he could walk there and experience it, but the sadness that that time will never happen again. I feel this technology, in my experience anyway, also connects with the younger audience too. It adds a sense of wonder and fascination of where things have come from, we are all constantly surrounded by digital technology every minute of every day and to be able to see where this all came from and what led to it, to be able to physically see how it all works, with the wheels turning and the "data" occupying a physical space is a novelty to some; much how my dad occupying the physical landscape is now nothing more that a wishful novelty.
A lot of the above reasons are also behind my decision to use film for my stills. As mentioned I'm very much in love with the process of shooting on film, and the hands on approach to producing an image. As much as my father got me interested in the outdoors as a child, he also helped mould my love for a hands on approach to everything. I've made furniture and wired up electronics with his help and guidance countless times and I feel making a print in the darkroom satisfies the same part of my brain as all of the other creative and practical functions the construction projects we have worked on together has done. As mentioned in my 'project concept and origins' post, this project was born as a want to link my two passions of film photography and the outdoors together, and although it had evolved into a project about my father and his inability to experience these landscapes any more, it is still very much at heart centered around my passion for these two activities and endevours.
I had discussed with my tutor about how I was going to present all this work, and the idea was to have a small nondescript table or wooden plinth for the projector to sit atop, from where it would project an image of my father walking up and down the length of the frame onto a number of 8x10" stills affixed to the gallery wall. We were potentially going to have to construct a box or a room for this to all be shown within, this dependent on the gallery space allocated to me and the amount of light let in to the room it would be shown it however this never got any further into the planning stage that it being a possibility due to the closure of the university and thus gallery space. Another thing spoken about at length to do with presentation was the looping of the film. There were issues that the film would have to be rewound every time the film had reached its end, and seeing as I had bought a roll only lasting 2.5mins this would have had to be done often and many times throughout the day. I had the thought of looping the film, just taping each end together at the length it took to go from one reel all through the machine round the second reel and back to the first, however even though the footage would only last 2.5 minutes it was 50ft long which was an issue. At this point I had tried searching the internet for examples of people looping this much film through a projector in the past and came up with a few ways of doing it - none very practical though. most involved a series of pulleys or large boxes to hold the film which ultimately I felt would take away from the main focus of the project, this along with the fact that having to run this film in front of a hot bulb for hours on end for days at a time which could cause damage to the film and potentially (this had to be investigated further to confirm) be a fire hazard meant that other avenues had to be looked into. One option was seeing if I could create one loop of my dad walking up and down the frame line up with the length of film needed to create only one loop through the projector and each reel, with another being that there is just someone -me- stood near the projector ready to flip the reels once they end which was looking the most likely. This meant that my still images had to be interesting enough to be stand alone without the projected images which is what lead to me developing the mask work and distortions from last semester further.
This further development entailed using full body silhouettes compared to last semesters head shots and I even incorporated my own likeness into these as well as my dads. This was due to the fact that a part of this concept is our collective wish and dream for him to be able to accompany me on the hikes and outdoor activities I do but knowing this will never be a reality. I moved away from a lot of the heavy distortions I was doing last term to focus more on the silhouettes as they're much more detailed being full body as opposed to just the shoulder and above. Perhaps if there was more darkroom time I would have gone further with this as I like to not have plans completely set in stone when I start them, as mentioned in previous posts and writings I like my work to inform me as much as I inform it as it develops and evolves.
As for the side project, I had decided to produce a photobook consisting of my favourite unedited - bar the use of contrast and brightness adjustments - landscape images. This was because of the many gorgeous landscapes I had captured and expected I would continue to capture that I could not include in the main project due the limit on how many prints would fit within the confines of the projection. I planned on scanning in the negatives and doing this small amount of adjustments digitally before sending off an order for a dead matte hardback book to be printed for me. I wanted to give a showcase of the Welsh landscapes I had fallen in love with since first moving to Aberystwyth in 2016, and a nod to the initial spark of this concept being my love of the landscape and the natural world surrounding me.
CHANGES
After the closure of the uni I was still planning on using cine film as I have my own standard 8/super 8 projector as well as an enlarger and B&W processing chemicals and tanks (both for paper and film) at my house so it would be a possible to do all this at home. I loaded in a super 8 movie I had bought off of eBay (The Mummy's Ghost staring Lon Chaney Jr and John Carradine if anyone is interested) and started up the projector just to test that the bulb was still functional and to measure out the size of the projection so I knew how many stills I could incorporate. Due to the limitations in space as at this point as I was now looking at setting up the presentation of my work in my bedroom, the largest size I could get the projection screen facilitated 3 8x10" prints.
At this point I still needed to actually shoot the footage of my dad on the super 8. I had chosen Kodak Tri-X reversal film which is a black and white film stock, it is reversal which means it can be developed in such a way that the film that goes through the camera is the same film that goes through the projector, negative film needs to be laid over a blank film and exposed to light to make a separate positive film whereas this Tri-X I bought is like positive slide film. I had chosen this not only for its easy availability and less processing it would need to go through compared to a negative film stock, but the fact that all of my stills were to be in black and white and I felt the projection of the same would work best visually and conceptually. A colour projection could pull too much focus away from the stills, and also seem somewhat gimmicky and tacky which is something I have been very careful to avoid since the onset of this project in semester one, I feel a colour projection would make it look as if I was trying too hard for it to appear as if my dad really was in these landscapes (something that would potentially be doable for someone with Photoshop experience) which is not what I am going for whatsoever, I want that disconnect to be apparent because he cannot and will not ever be in these landscapes.
I managed to get back to Sussex on March 20th with all of my equipment along with a digital camera I had borrowed from the school of art as a back up as I was still unsure whether any of my processing chemicals would work sufficiently with the super 8 film I had. I had had the location for filming in mind from very early on in this project as I wanted to make sure that I could get as light a background as possible for my father to walk against, with as little distractions as possible. This meant that I needed it to either be a clear sky or evenly overcast with little cloud definition, and to choose a place where there was an empty background with no fences or trees etc. I chose this one place that my family had often gone to for dog walks for as long as I could remember, somewhere called West Hill near Cissbury ring in Sussex. This place was perfect because there was a very gentle hill where my dad could be walking across the top whilst I was positioned slightly lower than he was, not low enough that the angle would distort his figure but low enough that it reduced the amount of ground behind his figure and instead he was walking against mostly a backdrop of a clear sky. The reason I wanted as clear a background as possible is so that the details of the stills that this footage is being projected onto are as clear as can be and unobscured by any outside imagery.
It was within a day or two of filming this footage that a nationwide lock down was announced, which meant I had to quickly rethink some of the changes I had already made to this project and set into motion further changes to the presentation of this concept. I now had to source a digital projector as I already had filmed what I needed on the digital camera lent to me by the school of art, and I suddenly had to work out how to use photoshop. After a while of getting to grips with how to edit my scanned in negatives in a similar way to what I would have been doing in the dark room, I had discussed with one of my tutors why I had chosen these distorted and edited images over solely landscape stills previously. That's when we realised that many of the factors that lead me to choose that no longer existed as a digital projector can run as long as its plugged in and the bulb doesn't give out, there's no risk of heat from the bulb warping the film (because there is no film) and it doesn't need someone to rewind and reset the film after every 2.5 minutes. As well the fact that a lot of my digital edits were feeling very lack luster and cold, qualities I put down to me being a beginner in the truest sense of the word to digital editing, and that a lot of the qualities I loved about my edited prints were products of the unpredictable and organic nature of post processing within a dark room. Due to all of this, I decided that I would proceed with non-edited - bar minimal contrast and brightness adjustments - landscapes as the stills on which to project the image of my father on. I felt they were less distracting from the concept, more aesthetically pleasing on the eye compared to my digital edits, and better curated the atmosphere I desired my project to exude.
Once I sourced a digital projector, I pushed the limits of how big an area of projection I could create within the given space I had. Previously with the film the size of the projection from my reel to reel projector within the space I had would limit the stills to 3, however with the digital I found I could use 6 images whilst still having a sizable gap between each image. This meant having to re-film the footage of my dad walking so that his projected figure stayed within the 8" boundary of the printed stills. I decided to keep this footage black and white as the super 8 film would have been not only to call back to the initial plans, but also for all the reasons I had chosen black and white film originally.
The biggest changes the travel restrictions had brought on were down to the fact I was now at home with my father. It was now possible to involve him with the project in a way I could not have done if I was in Wales. Not only could I ask his opinion on aspects of the presentation, but my whole side project was rethought. Instead of a photobook containing only landscape stills - something now redundant due to the use of more unedited stills on the wall and the lack of the ability to go on more hikes - I flipped my main project presentation on its head. Where that main project was a projection of my father onto a landscape, the side was a projection of a landscape onto my father. Where the main projection was a black and white positive, the side was a colour negative. Where the main had intermittent sounds of the home, the side had a bombardment of sounds of the landscape and voice clips from my father. It allowed me to delve into an aspect of the concept revolving around my fathers own fading memories and dreams of interacting with the landscape in a disorienting way.
These travel restrictions also brought about a change of exhibition space. No longer was my work to be shown in a gallery setting, inside a constructed box to control the outside light. Now I had the ability to exhibit my work within the lounge my dad has spent the majority of his time post-diagnosis. This gave me the ability to have the exhibition space become integral to the presentation of my work's concept in a way it could not have been so far from home in a gallery. I could now curate this space with items belonging to my dad, items that showcase further both his continued passion for the outdoors and the restrictions his his disease places on him. Instead of being an empty box it was now an interactive installation full of family photos, ornaments, sentimental mugs and the objects he is surrounded by during his waking hours. It is the lounge I grew up in as a child, the lounge he has been sat in whilst his degenerative disease affects him more and more each year, and now it is the lounge that my final degree work is exhibited. The room is full of memories both good and bad, of things such as milestones in my and my brothers development and growing up, of my father moaning in agony as his joints swell. It gives the audience (if there were to be one) the ability to interact with the work in more ways than just walking in front of a projection. They can sit on the sofas us as a family have sat on, the can look closely and handle ornament depicting my fathers favourite birds of prey, and they can listen to sounds from about this house that my father was diagnosed in.
The pandemic restrictions that were put in place in the UK were destructive to my degree work in many ways, ways that I overcame through hard work and creative thinking, but they also opened doors that would not have been possible to open hundreds of miles away from home which ultimately let me present my work in such a way that it was at point difficult for any member of my family to be inside that room as we were so overcome with the emotional atmosphere of it all. I set out to provoke thought and evoke feeling in the audience and I managed to do just that both despite and because of the difficulties that stood in the way.
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