Individual Tutorial

My tutorial this week was very insightful yet again and has given another layer of meaning to my project that I feel is definitely worth exploring. in fact, it is starting to change the project slightly and this is an interesting development. Laura likes to find out more and is very good at asking the right questions that lead to deeper exploration of my motivation for my project.

We discussed the narrative around ‘walking’ and the book I have been reading by Erling Kagge, called Walking. I am starting to see that there is tremendous significance to the act of walking and the metaphorical association with a journey or quest. In many ways this is me mapping my location with my feet and this relates to the concept of psychogeography as discussed by Merlin Coverley in his book by the same name. I have observed that walking is a way that I discover the true nature of a place, mapping it in my psyche in the tradition of the ‘urban wanderer’ referred to by Coverley. This is a thread that weaves through this project and my photographic practice as a whole.

I discussed with Laura how lost I felt after Ursa the Bear had been removed from the Bearpit and discussed how some of the photographs I included in my presentation today reflected this sense of loss and emptiness. It had led me off on a tangent focusing on autumn in the city as a poignant reminder of the transient and fleeting nature of all things. Although Laura liked the autumn images, saying they make her want to touch them but she did not feel they were part of the same project as my Bearpit work.  She described them as being beautiful surfaces and beautiful things, but said that if I wanted to include them in this project then I would need to be creative about how I paired the images with others in order to capture attention.

In looking through my photographs from the Bearpit, Laura said that she felt like I was hovering in a safe space with this project and she wanted to see my going deeper with it. She has suggested that my project is becoming about looking for the bear and, in so doing, looking for my own sense of place. Laura has suggested that Looking for Ursa is potentially the name of this project and could be the central concept to it. She is definitely challenging me to connect to the emotional and psychological aspects of this project and my relationship with it.

Laura particularly loved the image of the stairs and the wall sequenced together – she says these are very decisive in their framing.  They are almost black and white in their stark contrasts, and the flatness is appealing, they could be taken anywhere – in other words we don’t know where they are from or why they are there – making it intriguing.  She said that as the viewer she is almost unsure if they are outdoors or indoors shots and there is a feeling of the outdoors being indoors or vice versa. This is why the sequencing of work is important, as it creates an experience for the viewer.

Most importantly, Laura wants me to really go looking for Ursa, and an idea was to go about finding her origins and history, looking at archival material.  The project is about finding her, anything I can find out about Ursa is important to the project and would be interesting to the work. It may turn out to be less about actually find Ursa but perhaps about what I find out, or find along the way.  

References: Coverley, M. (2018). Psychogeography. Chicago: Oldcastle Books.