Developing Documentary Photography Projects - 12

week programme.

Session: 4

Tutor: Andrew Jackson

Recap

Research

When producing your photographic

works you are actually

conducting and producing research

• It’s observational

• It’s polemical – it constructs an argument, especially one refuting or attacking a specific opinion or doctrine

• It’s didactic - instructive, instructional, educational, informative – it tells you how to see something

Research proposal

All photographic series are harvested from research – from scholarly investigations to catching an

overheard conversation on the bus. Researching a project is as challenging and exciting as taking the

photographs, sometimes more so.

•It frames, informs and focuses the final photographic images.

•As a photographer, you need the skills and knowledge to be able to nurture the seed of an idea.

How would you start researching a new photography project? 

“You need to get the broadest possible perspective on the subject matter. I’ve got a new project coming up where I’m doing some work around [a village] in France.

As a documentarist, the first thing I need to do is go there, pick up all the local papers, listen to the local radio stations, talk to as many people as possible, look at the history of the place and the political, economic position it’s in.

Of course I’d take photographs as well, for reference material and to develop new ways of thinking photographically.”  Anna Fox

1) Planning

2) Developing ideas through research

3) Practice as research

4) Compiling your research

5) Research & practice

6) The impact of research

1) Planning

a) What are you going to do?

b) Why do you want to do it?

c) How are you going to do it?

d) Who is it for?

e) How or what do you want them to feel?

1) Planning

a) A research proposal

b) Being informed – History

c) Being informed – Practice

What ethical considerations come into play when you’re planning a project?

There are two sides to the ethical dilemma. One is that I want to tell a story that’s relevant to the people and area I’m photographing, but at the same time I have to be true to myself. You need to know about the people – what they believe in and don’t believe in, what’s really happening. You’ve got to be sensitive to situations where people don’t want things known and deal with that in a more subtle way. 

The other thing is you have to look at the situation and laws of the place and observe those. I rely on the fact I talk to most of the people in my pictures about what I’m doing. I explain it [in terms of] the importance of recording things, tell them that I’m a photographic artist; that it’s for publication and exhibition purposes. That’s really different to it being for mass publication in a magazine or for a scientific research project. It’s more emotional.

Anna Fox

“Ideas do not exist in a void – nothing is absolutely new”

• Be passionate about the subject

•Have a thorough understanding of the subject

•Have realistic expectations

•Don’t have preconceived ideas

•Show the images to others

Research Proposal

Research proposals are a key part of the research process.

Developing a basic research proposal will benefit the structure of any project

and the way you go about making it.

More detailed proposals can be used for funding purposes so the ability to write a proposal is important for all

photographers

Main areas of research proposal:

The Title

The topic or theme

Who is your audience

Approach and methods

Getting in

Timetable and budgets

Recording references

The Title

The title is vital

it sets the tone and

reveals symbolically what your project is about

Start with a working title first

it’s ok to change it as your project develops

The topic or theme

•Contains all of the key details about the project•No need or a long essay this part should be concise

•Perhaps 3 or 4 paragraphs of the total proposal•Write it in a positive way

•Explain what it is you intend to do•Give as much relevant info on the subject that you can

•Discuss how you will approach making the photographs•How you expect the work to develop

Who is your audience

•Your proposal should discuss the context and audience of your proposed work

•Consider where you would like your finished work to exist in the world

•Is it an exhibition, a publication, multi media piece or installation •public art work, a picture essay etc...

•Consider how each context would give the work a differing meaning

•Looking at how others, historically and in contemporary contexts

•are using photography will help you determine this.

Approach and methods

Your proposal should detail your approach to making the work and the different practical methods you will explore during the project.

This can simply be a list film, camera, lighting and processing etc or a discussion of the technical issues and how they relate to the meaning of the project.

Discus how you intend to conduct your research

Getting in

Timetable and budget

Proposed research references

Practice as research

What to do and why

Style, medium, genre and technique

So what could your project be.....

Documentary Project

Work related

Friends /people who you meet

Hobbies

Local / National events

Personal concerns / point of view – dictate approach.

Keywords

Record your / thoughts &Findings

Angle, approach, bias

Case study

From a small island (working title)----------------------------

“No-one on that ship…thought we’d be leaving home forever, but when my father hugged me on the dockside, for some reason, I knew I’d never see him again…I still see my father; you know, in my mind at least… after all these years…but I can’t see his face….no matter how hard I try…I never see his face.”

 

Amy Jackson

This work in development for the Midland Arts Centre, Birmingham; stems from an earlier investigation entitled ‘Notes From a Small Island.’ It’s a work that will examine the legacy of migration, on both sides of the Atlantic, via the experiences of those who came from the Caribbean to work in the factories of Britain, in the long austere years after war - and who never left.

 

The experiences of one couple in particular acts as a catalyst to open and explore the political landscape of Britain, during the last sixty years, but also the story of Jamaican migration, within a dialogue of race, identity and the global movements of people. Movements that cast lives in a temporaneous arc of what was, what has become and what could have been.

 

For the sons and daughters of the Commonwealth, who came to the Motherland, there will be no monuments built to bear their names. And no wreaths will be laid to remember those who came to help rebuild what war had broken. Perhaps this is why I have chosen to photograph my family, to make a mark that says that they were here and cannot be forgotten.

My parents, Alford and Amy Jackson, both left Jamaica, one by plane, the other by ship; unknown to each other, and yet, both destined to meet

life at the end their travels. They would be travels that would take them from, what was, to what would be, and travels that would see them leave behind all that they knew and loved - fathers, mothers and brothers - never to see them again.

So this is their story but it is also a story of Jamaica, migration, Britain, identity but also of the interplays of race in the shifting geographical planes that mark one’s concept of home.

Yet somewhere in my mother’s mind, the ship that took her from Jamaica is still out there at sea. Forever sailing in a world of fair seas and calm waters where her father and brother are alive again and waiting for her by the dockside to come home.

This work will return to Jamaica to see what was left behind in the wake of her passing and examine the myths and folklore that she has constructed to maintain who she once was in the world that is no more.

Britain’s gain could have been Americas as my parents each considered the journey northwards but regardless it would ultimately prove to be Jamaica’s loss. What leaves cannot remain and Jamaica, bereft of those who waved their final goodbyes, would pay a price for the loss of those who left to rebuild one world only to leave another to fall

The scope of this work is large and encompassing because it examines not just the stories of a few people but the story of the many during the last sixty years of this country and so is deserving of this scale. It will seek to examine the landscapes of migration from Jamaica to Britain and the States within a work that examines the lies that we tell ourselves as much as the lies which are told against us. But this work will also be a legacy of my story.

This work will adopt a multidisciplinary approach encompassing still and moving image, drawing and installations in order to create an atmosphere that challenges and causes the audience to both reflect on and experience the journey of migration and transformation

Steven Mayes cited in 2009, when discussing the entries for World Press Photo that year, that there are such “huge gaps" in "black culture and [the] expanded vision of black life outside Africa" that are being ignored by photography. Mayes later went on to say that what is lacking in photojournalism is work that "is really intimate and truly personal". In that light, I hope, as this work develops that it can indeed be really intimate, sensitive, open and truly personal.

 

Time of course is not ours to own, as we are all powerless to prevent its passage and powerless too to prevent our march into infirmity. Therefore the loss of who we once were, within the inevitable journey across the sea of life from cradle to the grave, cannot be halted; but its story, nonetheless, should be told.

Andrew Jackson• •

Being informed – History

Researching both the changing historical photographic

developments but also having a context surrounding your topic of

observation

Being informed – Practice

Looking at the works others

Compiling your research

Keeping a sketchbook / workbook

Blogging

•

•

Research & practice