Week 8/9: Contexts & Audience & Online Galleries
The first of my assignments this week was to create an online Gallery, to feature my work in a considered presentation and on a suitable website platform. This was then to be shared on the forum with a view to subsequently discussing it amongst the cohort.
Rather than show my work in progress I decided to create two galleries of 20 images, representing the two significant periods of my practice prior to joining the course. The first was my experimental abstract work from 2016/17 and the second my portrait imagery from the last 3 years. I decided rather than to experiment with a new website/platform I would use my existing professional site. I use Squarespace which is a subscription service and offers a considerable number of templates and functionality, very much aimed at professional/business users. I am very keen on the way is presents images, with the ability to utilise a lightbox to enlarge the image once clicked upon.
It was interesting to see how others have tried the traditional Wordpress and Portfoliobox sites which are very popular and considerably cheaper. Having looked at fellow students websites many of them on these platforms looked very good, and certainly as pleasing to the eye as mine. Because I am not a keen website designer I am not tempted though to move away from a service I already pay for, to spend considerable time away from my research in its development.
Here is one of the galleries that were shared in the forum, and then subsequently discussed in a webinar with other students on Nov 18th at 18:00. Overall the feedback was positive, and it was great to discuss others work and how we were progressing and taking on very differant directions with our research projects.
We also spent some time looking at practitioners of photography this week, and how they choose to present their work, and what audiences they are targeted at.
Of particular interest to me was the wunderkind Gregory Crewdson whose behemoth works adorn gallery walls on a cinematic scale. Crewdson has massive budgets and timescales to produce epic depictions of life in small town America, and upon first impressions they look like the most intricate paintings. It is hard to see how his work could be properly viewed and appreciated in other medium than as a hanging picture. Too much content and story would be lost were these to appear in a table top book, or small print.
Crewdson’s technique is to use film set style spaces, or large location shoots to achieve his compositions. Often the landscape dwarfs the people in the images, or humans will be the focal point in a small interior shot. The sense of scale is predominant in how he presents his work, along with incredible attention to detail. Often using large format photography to capture the complexity of his subject matter, it is interesting to see how observers take so long to absorb the information he presents them with, trying to analyse what is or has happened in the scenes. Personally I find his work astonishing, and am amazed at the concepts and execution which can be intimate, and epic at the same time. He really is a storyteller of the highest order and his work leaves you in charge of decyphering what the message is.
Figure 1: CREWDSON, 2003, Untitled