Exam Review

The exam brief theme is 'Covert and Obscure' but my chosen starting point within that was 'Life'. I followed these two themes when taking my first roll of film and digital photo shoot. My four original ideas when taking the film were spying on someone from a far on there daily life, objects in obscure places, my cats point of view on daily life and hidden identity. I feel that the hidden identity theme has the most potential but this could also incorporate spying on someone on the daily life. This way both the exam theme and my chosen starter point theme will be met.

At the beginning of the project I looked at the four different ideas stated in the paragraph above, from this I decided on taking the hidden identity theme forward. I then began to experiemtn with different techniques that could portray this theme well, such as blocking out the subjects face, painting on the developer to obscure the image and sandwiched negatives that merges two photographs together. After doing some research on other peoples double exposures and sandwiched negatives I came across Anton Corbijn and I decided I would try taking a close up photograph and a distant photograph of someone from behind to merge together. As he has done a similar piece but with two photographs taken of people from the front.

My favourite and most successful experiment is the sandwiched negatives technique as it gives the image depth and captures your attention as there are two images to look at. 

I feel the least successful experiment was the handmade negatives as you are very limited with what you can do as there is only a small space to use and once you get something that looks good developing it further is not easy. For example using a handmade negative with another negative, it is hard to get the handmade negative to show up on the print unless something like salt is used, that doesn't let much light through, it doesn't work very well.

The experiments and techniques I would like to develop further are sandwiched negatives, collage, combination prints and painting on the developer. For my final prints I would like to use black and white film.

The artist that is currently inspiring me the most is Anton Corbijn and his sandwiched negative prints made for the Travis album cover. I have also looked at Sigmar Polke and Mario Corea's work which I really like and would possibly like to combine some of their techniques into my work. 

In the two weeks before the exam I want to play around in the darkroom with my favourite experiments to develop them and try and come up with some imaginative ideas for my final prints. I would also like to create some more collages using my new prints to help me decide what technique I want to take forward.