This week our coursework was focused on creative collaboration and learning how this could support and develop our photographic practice. The task was set to work in creative partnership with one or two of our peers to create and deliver a micro-project by the end of the week.

To find our creative partners, we were tasked to post something in our forum discussions, text or image, that we felt a connection to and which represented something about ourselves and our work. We then looked at the contributions shared by our peers to find a post that resonated with our own and from this established our groups.

I chose to post the following quote as it is how I approach much of my urban photography:

“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.” – Elliot Erwitt

This immediately connected me with my peer, Dean, who posted these song lyrics: ” Life is just a bowl of All-Bran. You wake up every morning and it’s there. So live as only you can. It’s all about enjoy it ’cause ever since you saw it , there ain’t no one can take it away.” – lyrics from Happy Days Toytown by the Small Faces.

We both felt an immediate connection around finding beauty in the ordinary things and this became the foundation from which we structured our project. We had been given complete freedom to choose a theme, the content and creative direction of the project with the only specifications being that we needed to create a small body of work in it’s own right which was formed in collaboration and which could be presented in a digital format.

Dean and I had a conversation on the phone about the project and very quickly came up with a simple project idea and process. We agreed to take a walk in our respective cities with the parameters being the same day of the week, the same time and duration, and it had to be in a local context. The aim would be to look for the beauty in the ordinary along the path of the walk and this would generate a body of images we could then collate.

We both ended up wandering much further than we anticipated and went off the intended routes but the result was rather interesting. When we looked at our images side by side, we began to notice similarities in the forms, the themes, the subject and mood despite being in very different cities.

I had a good eye for pairing up images so that each page of our presentation has a side by side image by each photographer. Dean was brilliant at designing and compiling the presentation. We chose the images together, agreed on the layout and edit of the final compilation and created the text together. The entire process felt incredibly easy and fluid because we made such a great creative match based on the shared vision in our work.

When we presented it at our webinar, we both spoke about our images and why we took them, also looking at why we paired them the way we did. I felt that it was a balanced dialogue between us and the creative vision was easily articulated to our peers and tutor. We got very positive feedback at the webinar and also when we shared it in our discussion forum.

Looking at the work produced by our peers, it was very exciting and inspiring to see how others had approached this micro-project and the way they had chosen to present it. I was also amazed at the way in which certain themes repeatedly came through in each of the projects, for example environmental issues, the celebration of day to day life, finding meaning within the ordinary, and home or sense of place.

This was an incredibly valuable experience as I mostly work on my own and did not realise how working collaboratively can actually take the creative process into new directions and out of the usual comfort zones. It was a great activity and I learned so much from my peers and from working in creative partnership!