MA Photography - Time - Tutorial with Aaron Schuman

I had my tutorial with Aaron Schuman of Seesaw magazine. I showed him my 5x4 test images, my journal, scans from the photos that I shot on the Mamiya 7 and the prints that I had made from those negative.
He seemed to like my updated idea of making a journal and having photographs that go with it. But we spoke about what the frame work could be. As in, could it be a day, a month, a week, an hour, a year? in the life of me. What would be interesting to other people about that? He suggested a weekend as it is a length of time that people are familiar with, like a convention that people are aware of. People go to work for 5 days then have a two day break. I like this idea, and I think it works well with my own line of work where I often go to work on the weekend, going away on the Friday evening to then come back on Sunday, unlike the majority of people working their 5 day week and having a weekend break.
However I'm not sure this works for me personally, its hard to put my finger on why. I think it is because a lot of the photographs happen in the week, a lot of the story happens in the week days. I think when I have so many pictures and I start to editing them down, that is where the sequence and the concept will come out. For now I will try and photograph every little thing, all the small overlooked things in my day. The writing on my hand to remember things, the arrangement of papers on the desk, the ripped hole in my trousers, the random assortment of pens near my workspace, the view of the seats infront of my eyes as I sit on the train for the 1000th minute.

My notes from the tutorial:

How can I turn my project into something for the viewer?
Procrastinating is almost when I'm deliberately wasting my own time - rather than when time is wasted by something not under my control.
In my journal I am not really describing what I am thinking in these moments, just a small narrative of what is happening. in that moment - why is someone else going to be interested?
How can I make my thoughts more visible?
Somehow communicate the frustration of losing time and translate visually the feeling of frustration of wasting it

AS on procrastinating all day - "no matter how much time you're given, you're going to waste it"
"It could be that what you think is wasted time is actually just you living your life"
He said to me if I had one month with no responsibilities what would I do? In that moment I thought maybe I would just stay looking at facebook or watching tv or looking at funny pictures.

How would I make a story of losing time in a sequence? The time of the piece of work. Is it 1 day, 1 month, 1 hour 1 year? what could it be?
To tell a story I need to find that structure.
Perhaps I need to catalog all of that stuff of what I could be doing if I wasn't 'trapped by time'
I need to get the viewer into my own head.
The weekend as a time for the piece - its supposed to be a time off, its relatable - i could collect everything, pictures of everything, all the little things.
The documentation of me wasting time - could it be a work of fiction, presented as fact?

He suggested I look at Michael Schmelling - the week of no computer.

MA Photography - Time - Authorship seminar by Joanna Lowry

Handwriting, an element of touch, a photograph of handwriting is as good as a portrait. It is as a metonymy for that portrait. The signature, when you first make a signature is when you become a person.
Handwriting, like photography are descriptive marks of a person, by a person, of a thing. Photography has created an apparatus to mark the desire of sexuality and death.
Photography leaves a trace of the image, writing leaves a trace of the author. The surface has been disrupted.

Roland Barthes - Studium and Punctum
Studium - all the messages clearly visible in a picture. transforms reality without making the world shudder.
Punctum - the punctum cant be something chose by the photographer, it always has to be an accident. Holding the world in front of us in place and blinds us from it. The punctum isn't in the photograph, it is in the individual viewers engagement with the photograph.
Photography is about pulling back the curtain to see things for what they really are.

MA Photography - Time - More small moments

I shot these with Kodak Tri-X iso 400 film, in the developing process I pushed it to iso 800 as I had shot it at 800. I think if i was looking for real nice prints I would be disappointed. However some of these have a huge amount of grain, but I really like this overall look to these pictures, I cant wait to print them. I think it would be great actually if some had some more grain or had a bad focus or something. I love the mistakes of double exposures and the tear in one of the frames. I look forwards to finishing my next roll of film with this process for this project.

MA Photography - Time - Tutorial/presentation with MA course

I presented my initial images on the 5x4 camera with the colour paper and explained how it wasn't quite working, and so I had started the diary journal and started shooting with a more portable camera.

They suggested many things for me to research:
Henri leFebure, Michel de Certeau - the everyday
Ben Highmore - boredom, non productive time
Sinkle, Eugienie - boredom and relationships to photography
Concepts in Modern Art, Reaction Press, Whitechapel, Steven Johnson, the everyday - on amazon
Sophie Calle - diary
Jim Goldberg, deutsche borse
Henry Fox Talbot, Lord Byrons handwriting.

We spoke about in the longterm, the same locations photographed over and over will create a sense of dejavu. To make things that are usually unrecorded a part of the world. To know the subject about which I'm doing. To find a way perhaps of bringing my other processes in.

MA Photography - Time - First prints

I made these prints in the darkroom from my negatives, they are on 10x8 Ilford black and white paper. These are just test prints on resin based paper, but I envision printing my project in this manner at the end of it.

I will do this because I like the tactile feel of the paper. I am thinking of binding them together in a book form. I think by the end of this project i will have several hundred photographs on film shot specifically for this project, and the art will be in the edit, I imagine i will still want to have prints of many of the photographs and having these smaller size 10x8s fits with that theme of having many pictures. The book form perhaps will mirror the physical diary in a book form that I am making.

MA Photography - Time - Wasting time

Wasting time on facebook

MA Photography - Time - Diary Relflections

Earlier in my photographic practice I have thought of the camera as my diary, and also contradictory, that photographing is as an event in its own right. Event happen, so I 'write them down' by using my camera. But often the act of photographing is more of an event than the object/scene that I am taking photographs of, so the photographs have a bland end result, often documenting plain events of nothing in particular. These photographs are almost unconsidered, but because they are almost unconsidered, almost pointless snapshots, they hold up that mirror to life. They show the world as it really is, in a most unstaged way. The staging is in the camera, but not the scene. But there will always be an element of staging, because one must make the choice what is in the frame and what is left out.

I find it interesting that I have gone from that use of solely a camera to record events in my life unsupported; to writing in a diary, an act I would usually be abhorred by, with which I hope to support my photographs and to give them context, a framework.
I also started the diary as another form of authorship over my work. Before when I was working I didn't feel I needed any added authorship to my images, perhaps shooting on such large format with a process that many wouldn't be able to accomplish and having such large negatives they were directly related to me. I personally loaded them into the darkslides, exposed them, developed them, scanned them, printed them, they were directly mine. I shot them in a style that is very me I suppose, but this project feels like it needs something to relate the pictures to my own personal life, the personal time in which small events are happening.

MA Photography - Time - Initial photos cropped

At this point in real time, I have started shooting with a 35mm film camera, so I cropped my pictures on 6x7 film to emulate this.

MA Photography - Time - Initial photographs

These are my initial photographs that I took in conjunction with my diary. I used a Mamiya 7, which created super sharp images. However these photos were difficult to take as I found the rangefinder focusing system hard to use, it was such a tiny rectangle in the middle of the screen, which made it difficult to use. I also made a mistake while processing the film, I think I used too little developer which created these bubbles at the bottom of my images. I used only 400ml of 1:1 dev and water.