Self Evaluation

For this module, International Markets and Contexts, we needed to work in groups to create a festival with our chosen theme. Initially, I did not think there would be so many aspects to consider. Research was vital in finding out what needed to be planned. This was the first part to the module. Looking at other festivals highlighted the layout, the importunacy of promotion and the cost of running a festival. It was helpful to look at websites with logos, posters and other advertising techniques that would interest the public to visit our festival.

The second stage of this module was to decide upon the location of our festival and theme, which we would, chose our practitioners and our images. The first theme we decided upon was the idea of culture, we wanted to each chose a part of culture such as fashion and religion, and to use this as our own ideas to work upon. But after speaking with Jason we felt this was too broad and would not allow us to narrow down enough. The next idea was identity, which we finally decided to go with. The location was chosen by our initial research on culture. In 2014, Riga the capital of Latvia has been chosen as the Capital of Culture. This would bring in a lot of tourism and potential visitors to the festival.  

Once the theme ad location had been chosen we then began to talk about choosing a practitioner and shooting our own work for the festival with the theme of identity. Initially I struggled with this idea, we all chose to focus on portraits, but I didn’t want to choose the obvious of maybe photographing someone in their own clothes. I decided to research previous photographers work around the same theme. The ideas I liked were around detailed parts of the body such as fingerprints and eyes, things that make us who we are and individuals. I decided to try the fingerprints first, but I struggled to get the images I wanted, and found it was too difficult to achieve. This brought me on to eyes, I loved the colours I could see in each person’s eyes, and how different they were. Before this shoot I assumed that everyone’s eyes were just one solid colour, but in my images you can see waves of different colours. I had 6 images, both male and female to have some contrast and variety in my images.

The artist I chose as my practitioner were French photographers Bruno Metra and Laurence Jeanson. They are collectively known as Metra-Jeanson. The particular work chosen is named ID. They cut out facial features from magazine editorials that are heavily done with make up taped them over models' faces to cover parts of their won faces. They then photographed their models, both men and women, wearing these partial masks. They wanted to focus on how they ‘disconnect between the edited faces and actual human features’.  These images show how models in the industry today are made up so dramatically to look perfect and photo shopped to improve their appearance on the front of a magazine. They talk about how they feel we are bombarded by images of others in the media, whom we try to compare ourselves to. Even though this body of work does not relate exactly to my own, I felt their ideas and thoughts suited our festival.

The presentation it self was a lot of hard work I didn’t expect. The amount of planning, and researching and working out prices took a lot longer than we first anticipate. We worked well as a team, and split the responsibilities with the 5 of us. We all had a clear view of what we wanted and our aims for this module. I found we were confident in what we were presenting and felt if we could, we would be able to organise this festival.

Over all I felt this module pushed me to think more openly, and I enjoyed working as a group. I did feel the support we got towards planning the festival as a whole was lacking, but it did make us work hard towards achieving what we did.  I would be more confident in the future if I had to plan my own exhibition and feel working, as a team was a good over all experience. Being able to set our own theme, but working in such different ways shows how we can work together on something, but still keep our own photography ideas.