How Did it Go?

What I did in the exam went mostly to plan. Doing the collage, I had no problem, however when doing the Polaroid piece I had a few problems. For starters I had used different Polaroid templates and had not realised they were different sizes. I had to separate the landscape Polaroids and put them as separate images because they wouldn’t fit right on the board and were different sizes to the normal Polaroids and to make them the same size I would have had to cut the image. I made them individual photos and looked up the time and place I took them and wrote that on them. If I had more time or did the exam again I would trim the Polaroids more carefully and maybe have space out my collage more.

Other than those small blips the exam went really well. I really love how all my images came out in the printer. The Polaroids had the discoloured, sometimes over exposed and scratchy look I wanted. When displaying them I took advantage of the really bright ones with dominant colours like red and orange and spaced them out so the eye is attracted to more places on the piece than one. I also spaced out the ones with less colour to highlight their lack of colour. I then wrote things on them because that’s what people do with Polaroids. They normally describe what is happening and date them so they are like youthful memories.

When displaying the collage I cut up lots of images displaying my family and individual member’s youth like my mum’s and dad’s (that I’d photocopied from originals), which included thing like seeing David Bowie in concert, joining the army and playing cards. I also included really old images of grandparents and great grandparents at my age. I didn’t want to do a neat lined up display for this one because the images were all different sizes and I wanted the fact that I layered them to represent how when moments of the journey of time are put together they flow into each other.

How do my Pieces Relate back to the Artists I studied?

I drew most of my inspiration for these pieces from Carinthia West and Kristen Lewis. Kristen Lewis documents the life or journey of a family through a day so in my collage piece I documented my family’s journey through multiple lifetimes, using photos from my parents and taking my own modern day ones. Carinthia West was my inspiring artist for my Polaroid piece and a bit for my collage piece. I found with her images she took were vernacular and documented the journey of youth and fun events that happened around her. My Polaroids document the journey of youth in different ways. They are all about having fun but also show how the youth of my time are very different from the youth of West’s time in the way that there are iphones in my images. I displayed my images as Polaroid because my generation has brought back the Polaroid camera. Lots of teenagers my age have instant cameras, and because they are taken at an instant, a moment of time recorded instantly like memories which I liked the idea of. West’s themes were also used in my collage piece in the way that I used a lot of images of my parents’ youth that was during the 70’s and 80’s which is when West took her images.

How do my Images Relate to the Exam Question?

The exam question way journeys and pathways. My Polaroid piece relates to the exam question in the way that it documents the journey of youth and generational journey. The journey of youth is documented in the images in the way that it shows young people having fun, getting ready to go out and playing, which is what being young is all about. The theme of a generational journey comes in with how I’ve displayed them as Polaroids and edited them to look discoloured as if they were from an older generation like the 80’s, including the folded and dirty looking polaroid templates I’ve used. My collage piece documents the journey of life, my family, youth and my journey, everything that led up to me. It also shows the different pathways of my family. Despite the fact that it’s the Le Clezio family crest at the start of it there is a lot of images of my Scottish family as well. There’s pictures of cousins, great aunts, great cousins which are like the different veins of my family like pathways of the blood.

Evaluation of My Project as a whole

I’ve really explored different types of journeys and pathways in my project. I started off documenting physical journey buy travelling to Scotland and taking pictures. I then decided I wanted to look at the exam question in a different way. I wanted to look at people as a journey which led to what I did for my exam. I think overall it’s all gone really well. My final images came out better than I expected as did my pieces. If I were to do the project again I’d maybe look at a physiological journey and surrealism. What I like most about my project is that it has a lot of meaning to it and that I’ve thought very deeply about it looking at all the ways I can use myself, my life to document a journey. I’ve thought about story boards and timelines and have slowly developed on those original ideas to get my final pieces.

I plan on using these images along with the ones I have found of my parents, grandparents and even great grandparents during their youth to create a chronological collage. I have images of my father in the army when he was 16, 17 and 18. I have my grand mother where she was 16 and I have my great grandfather at my age posing for a phone in a chair but also images of all of them, my mother, father, grandparents and great grandparents, later in life.

Collage

Polaroid

Polaroid

I’m going to display my Polaroids in a simple black background or in a frame. I think for these images I am better to keep it simple but polished in order to not take away from the editing I’ve done to the images.

Collage

I want to display my generational journey images images in a Bayeux tapestry style showing events in chronological order but looking almost like this bellow.I will use images of my parents and grandparents and also the images I took whilst exploring family and generational journey.

At this point I realised I should crop the images down to the size I want them to come out the printer. So I went back and resized the others.

I stopped screenshoting everything after this because I was doing the same thing over and over except with different blend options.

1. Polaroid https://youtu.be/u1_HKHjO-AY
2. Making them look old/ retro like the ones I’ve collected of my parents https://youtu.be/Pz4ztpS71iA
3. Glitch effect

I wanted to edit in different ways to get a range of images.

Polaroid

Retro

I’ve decided to edit the images into black and white because a lot of Carinthia West’s images are in black and white. I also plan on editing some in color because some of her images are in color and are really vibrant to I’ll play with vibrancy in Photoshop. I will then go on to experiment with how I want to edit them for the exam.

What I like about the two images above is the fact that they show an appreciation of nature which goes against the stereotype of a teenager staying in doors, being obsessed with fake things and social media.

The reason why I included the two images of the dog was because of the phone in both images. This is because as teenagers of the 21st century mobile phones are prominent in our lives due to social media. Which is different to the youth in West’s images in the way that they were always alert to what was happening around where as in these two photos you have this dog, something you’d think would take up all of our attention, howeverthere’s always a phone with us to take that attention.