Falmouth University highlights

When I am questioned about what my favourite memory of university has been, I look at them and smile. Little do they know the sheer amount of different moments they are trying to ask me to condense. I usually try and think of a particular moment that made me laugh the most. Again there are probably too many. There are some that are inside jokes (Luke) that wouldn’t be funny to you reading this but at the time were beyond funny. Anyway I’m going to jot a few of them down here and have a quick reminisce. All of these events happened during my time in Falmouth. I am going to kind of bullet point them a bit:

There was the time in first year when me and my housemate Luke forgot our ID’s to the Rugby club and had to walk all the way back to campus having been disallowed entry.

There was the time he had to leave the room due to laughter at the fight scene in Pineapple Express. The moment we got a noise complaint from the security office at 10pm for playing Fifa too loudly with the window open, Graham came round and shut us down.

The time my mate Will who is not so good at football was in goal, got passed the ball and in one swift motion smacked it into the nads of his team mate. There was another time when we were trying to knock a bottle off a goal post, we had been there some time, myself and Luke, Will asks if he can have a go, and proceeds to do it first time.Myself and Luke have never acknowledge this as actually ever happening until now.

The time in first year where I must have spent a good six hours straight playing Call of Duty Blackops. I knew that game inside out after first year play time.

Another great moment was when we had access to a car finally! We went on a road trip to a few of the nearer beaches, not a care in the world having finished first year, the shins on the stereo and the windows open in the glorious sun.

There was the National Trust trip working with the local kids in St Just for four days. Playing ‘it’ with them was huge amounts of fun.

The time in first year that we invented corridor football, along with corridor frisbee. (a particularly productive day)

The moment I fell off my chair with laughter and smacked my head on the floor after the miss of the century from Nyarko in a particularly important combined Fifa match. It was just the most timid shot you could ever imagine.

The time Luke and I created our own Fifa players, and for some reason I naming mine Jamilia Jamill.

All three of my birthdays were spent in great company and brought a lot of people together and deserve special mention.

The time neither myself or Luke agreed to bring the ball home and ended up just leaving it in the drive of someone’s house until one of us thought it best to go and get it.

The first badminton match that I won in a competitive environment, having been beaten so many times it was so refreshing to finally win something.

The time where Jess was describing Cheese Footballs and I lost my shit and laughed and laughed.

There was the time we had to source gravel from around campus for our set design project and got ask from the security if we permission to stick the gravel in a wheelbarrow. We did not. We had to put it back and go go and get it from another car park.

The times where I co-created both Loon Ball and Cup Catch, both highly vigorous and competitive physical games. (Another greatly productive day) (I should go into making new sports)

The group cooked meals in the glory second and third years, in particular James’s fish and chips which were home made, a truly great effort.

The time where I scored a bicycle kick with Emile Heskey on Fifa. Not an easy feat with a player of his quality I can tell you. Another time when we bought Heskey in career mode and he scored 5 goals on his debut. Along with Heskey we managed to scavenge Beckham for £1000 I don’t know how but we took him. Another fifa classic when we couldn’t sell Paul Robinson to anyone even when we lowered the asking price to a tenner.

The time when Claire and I swam out to the buoy on the stillest calmest day.

The time Luke paid for some one elses’ washing without really thinking about it. To go along with that one, the time I thought I’d press start on the washer on to come back 45 mins later and find I hadn’t.

The moment the ‘anvil’ move was used for the first time in Volleyball on Gylly beach much to everyone’s shock.

The time when Mark came to stay and we ate out at the same place for both dinner and breakfast.

The weekly trips to Carn Brae Tesco just to get a shed-load of berry smoothie for the following week.

And finally the moment I kicked the ball so far out the park that I had to run all the way to the bottom of Marlborough Road to get it.

 

That’s enough I reckon, there are so many more but I could go on all day, and I’m sure only a couple of people in Taiwan will read this anyway. If I think of any more that really must be told then I might even do a part 2. Even after all that I still came away with a 2.1.

Cheers

Adam

Me, myself and I

Right. Blog time, I guess. I’m going to keep it fairly short this week because I’m currently very angry. I have just spent the last hour writing a post for you guys and the save draft button on WordPress decided not cooperate. I therefore had to refresh the page and yep you guessed it I lost everything. So the 800 words that had done have been lost in the annuls of internet blogging. Sufficed to say that I’m a little peeved. However, I would rather be impaled on a giant cactus in no-mans land smoking endless cigarettes through a luminous balaclava than try and remember and repeat what I wrote word for word.

The topics that you would have gotten included a funny bank story, an observation on how to make a Tesco shop more productive, the last of the badminton sessions and how the quiz at five degrees went this week. (We came fourth from last) (out of 17).

Instead I’m just going pick up at the point were I lost the rest which was a food review of the Pandora Inn. Situated in Mylor next to the gorgeous Fal river ( I think its that one), the restaurant serves up a mean dish of just about anything. The portion sizes are grand and the price is fairly reasonable, maybe leaning towards expensive, especially when it comes to alcoholic beverages. It does a variety of dishes from veggie to meat and fish stuff. Today was sunday and so it felt right to go with customary roast. If you ask for both kinds of meats you end getting more than if you went for only one. A little trick there. It was super tasty. As you are allowed to eat as much of the rest of the meal as you want it is definitely worth the £10.95. The main reason to go though has to be the idyllic Cornish setting.

Another place that was tried out this week was the ‘Hub Box’ in Truro. As a part of a house trip to the city some of us had lunch at this burger paradise. Even though I had to order my second choice on the menu it was still by far and a way the best burger I’ve ever had. And this news comes having had a ‘Meat Counter’ burger from Falmouth’. It was just a step above everything else. Yes it was a little messy to eat. Yes it was the second choice burger. And yes it did make you feel as though your arteries were clogging up while you ate it, but that doesn’t seem to detract from it. I give it a 9/10 as I would have liked to have tried my first choice (which had sold out). You want a burger? Go there.

While the women in the house were shopping for dresses, the guys went and sat in the cathedral in Truro. That place is enormous. For the first time ever I also felt more calm from silence within the building unlike in other churches. We couldn’t help wondering about the people who built it and what a job it must have been. Someone must have died during construction. No electronics to measure thigns up with either. All by eye and mathematics. The place took over forty years to complete. I would have liked to have the guy who put the last block in place, immense satisfaction.

Thursday night saw me and my house mate Luke returning to the competitive arena of Fifa doubles. The tournament took place in 8 bit which is a gaming bar down in town. We felt obliged to enter as once in each year of uni so far we have entered a tournament to see how good we really are. Seeing as we only ever play on the same team at home we thought three years of practice would stand us in good stead. For the first time ever we won not our first but second game too. In fact we got all the to the final, playing some beautiful football and quickly became the favourites to go home with the astronomical prize fund of £24. We lost in the final 2-1, after some very questionable goals from the other pairing.

Saturday saw a huge number of people flock down to Gylly beach for the one and only Red Arrows. It was their first performance of the summer and it was hugely impressive. It gives you a little knot in the pit of your stomach watching the bits where they fly directly at each and effectively play chicken with one another. So many people turned up to it. The beach was packed, so was the hill up to Swanpool. After the display we headed for the Chain locker pub on the harbour front and had a lovely drink in the peak mid afternoon sun.

We went out on Friday night to an event at Watermans due to a lot of other courses finishing their degrees that day. So it was therefore very busy out. Turned out to be a pretty fun night in truth.

Along with all that fun, the sweep stake amongst my friends was done it preparation for the world cup. We were given four teams, two lower seeds and two top seeds at random. I have been drawn with Nigeria, who have got no chance whatsoever of doing any damage to any body else. Second is Bosnia and Herzegovina, same goes for them. Third is Belgium, interesting one this. A good squad with experience in other cups but never performed on the biggest stage of all all that well. And lastly was England. Fan-bloody-tastic. I may as well just kiss my money goodbye. A little piece of magic happened during the game against Peru mid week, check this out for one in a million shot:

My track out the week is a classic that just makes you feel as though the sun in just around the corner:

Thanks for reading. I will make sure that I get a practitioner piece up this week.

Adam

The final countdown and Gregory Crewdson

Well that’s that then folks. I have completed my final hand-in for my time at university. It is quite a surreal feeling that is hard to explain. There is now a constant feeling that during this free time, I should in fact be working on something or other. I then remember that there will never be anything else to really get on with down here. There are few pieces of the jigsaw that need to be added but bar them its sun sun sun from here on out.

For those of you who were wondering how the presentation went; you will hopefully be happy to know that it went very well. I spent a long time during Monday and Tuesday writing myself a set of cue cards and in the end I simply winged it. The time flew by and apart from one bit where I lost my train of thought, I feel like I nailed it.

Tuesday led to a celebratory session of badminton which was good fun, and a very tiring one.

I went to Five Degrees West on Wednesday evening for a birthday meal. It was a highly amusing evening. The food at Fives is gastro pub in style and for the first time in a long time everyone on the table ordered something different which allowed me to scout out the other meals available. I ordered a selection of tikka halloumi skewers. They were accompanied with a tahini sauce and chutney with some pita breads. I will say that it would have been nice to have a tad more halloumi seeing as that was supposed to be the main ingredient. I have been quite a few times to this glorious place, which is renowned for its ‘legendary burger’ which is a double burger with bacon and a fried egg. I have previously almost been beaten by that behemoth so I thought I should probably give something else a go as I wasn’t at the point of peak hunger that I needed to be if I were to tackle the legend. Along with the food, Fives is also the place where we go to compete in the pub quiz. It just has real nice chilled vibes. It is slightly cheaper than some of the other restaurants around Falmouth and is a good alternative to these posher establishments. I would give the food 7/10 but overall with the quiz thrown in the whole place a very solid 8/10.

Thursday was the night to celebrate as most of the course hit Club I. It was a hugely fun night as someone even went as far as getting the course a shout out from the DJ congratulating us all on finishing. Of course a huge cheer went up.

Throughout the week we have had to hang the end of year show in the studio space up on campus. The whole process is incredibly pedantic as we had to measure out the distance from the floor to the middle of picture and then the gap between the prints. Don’t even get me started on accounting for the sag factor of each piece of supporting string on the frame. Each frame had a different tautness which made it very hard to accommodate for the dropping of the frame. A couple of holes had to be re-drilled. The private view is on the 23rd of May so please do come up to campus and have a good old ganders at some incredible work. (Not just my own I hasten to add)

I have been down to the beach on a couple of occasions this week, yesterday (Saturday) it was beyond busy. Ideally I want to get to go to a proper Cornish soft sand beach rather than go to Gylly but getting to these other dreams beaches is an issue. I was so very close to not getting burnt but in the end I forgot to cream the left eyelid (of course!) so one eye looks like it is is in a constant state of distress.

Following the blowout on Thursday, Friday was a far more relaxed evening of drinks. In Falmouth there is a great little place called Beerwolf which is a pub and library cross. It has a library in it but is also super hipster. it has risen in popularity greatly since coming onto the scene about a year ago. I reckon the beach will be calling once again this afternoon, although it sad seeing the rest of my house having to stay in and continue their work before their hand in on Friday.

My practitioner of the week is Gregory Crewdson. During first year we are bombarded with the guy. He appears in pretty much everyone’s work journal. The reason behind which is because he creates some pretty awesome images. On the boundary between being a cinematographer and photographer Crewdson’s sets require hundreds upon hundreds of people to set it up. Every shot is pumped full of atmosphere and you can’t help but admire the quality of the image. The images feel like an exert frame from a film. The images are shot on 5×4 large format cameras. The series that I would argue he is best known for is the ‘twilight’ series. The images are mainly taken in one particular town in America. I reckon the reason the images are so successful is down to the lighting. There is always a plethora of different lighting rigs that light the image. It creates a scene of impending danger or melancholy. There is also an ominous creepiness of an outside influence to a lot of the images. The grand elaborate set up are very well known in the photographic industry.

My new feature for this week is ‘track of the week’. I’ll try and integrate this feature in. The first is one for summer by Robin Thicke. It’s best to ignore the fact that that berk is the one who’s done the song and instead just pretend it’s someone else. This remix deserves to be turned up on the beach and chillaxed to.

That’s enough for this week. Now stop reading this and get out there and enjoy the sun!

Adam

Cooking it up a storm

We’ve been tantalised this week with the prospect of the summer sun. Sadly it still looks as though it could be a while until its sticks around for a prolonged period of time. It’s now only two weeks until final hand in, everything is kicked up a notch.

Onto my week. Last weekend was obviously a glorious long bank holiday and we tried to make the most of it. If I’m honest everything seems to have blurred into one this week, and I can’t remember anything of any great distinction occurring on Monday, so I think I’ll just by-pass that day.

Tuesday, phwoar, what a day. I had a one to one tutorial mainly to enable me to show my book design to the tutor. I was also able to pick up my test prints that I spoke about last post. They turned out really nice, and the decision of printing on the fine art really seems to have paid off. It has a fantastic feel to it and the grainy texture compliments the postcard looking effect. The colours have really been brought out too and the creaminess of the paper also takes the harsh white quality away from the print, which can sometimes be hard on the eyes. Anyway, I digress, back to the tutorial. I showed my book and I was given constructive criticism, as I was told to remove most of the writing from it and allow the focus to be on the images. I wasn’t best pleased about that as you can imagine. However I can see where the point was coming from. So I left knowing that I need to give myself ten days for the book to be turned around by Blurb. So throughout the rest of the week I have been sending of drafts to my person on the inside of the book layout industry, my sister. Between us, it is now almost at the stage which I am happy with. One of the biggest issues I’ve had this week with the process has been trying to come up with a title for it. It is bloody hard as it goes.  I want it to be succinct and encapsulating for the project. At the time of writing I still don’t know what it’s going to be. I have been told to try and use the word postcard in it. At this stage though it feel like one of those exam challenges you used to have with your friends in which you try and smuggle a particular word or phrase into the essay. I remember one such time when the challenge was ‘this is sparta,’ and from memory I think someone managed to pull it off. This is just for the title for a book for pity’s sake.

Tuesday evening saw a return to the court, we had a good little group playing and even managed to eek out an extra free hour from the sports hall which was a bonus.

Thursday saw me take part in the first of the last things at uni. (I know what I mean) We had  our last ever critique, now I’m not one to get sentimental over standing about talking about photographs for four hours but it’s just another thing that I won’t experience again at uni. It went well as most of the people I was showing the work to hadn’t seen it since the early stages and were impressed by the progress that had been made. It also allows you to gauge just how far along other people are in comparison with yourself. I think I am in a good place right now. I have to turn my attention to getting final prints done for both the exhibition and the portfolio. I think it should hopefully be straight forward as it was agreed that the prints wouldn’t need to be any more than A3 sized. So if I just print everything A3 on the Hahnemule paper then it should all be good. Famous last words is a phrase that springs to mind. How hard can it be ay?

On Friday I was pleasantly surprised to see that some of work was put up onto a blog run by an agency in London for young talent. Its called Ilovetalent and I’ll put a link in for those of you who won’t have seen it. It was very humbling to see my work out there and again it is a step in the right direction.

Due to the lack of badminton at the end of the week I was able to go swimming a bit more. They have finally fixed the underwater lights at St Michaels so it is now as though I am swimming of a beach in sunny Barbados or somewhere equivalent. This weekend won’t entail anything too spectacular. I plan to go to the pub to watch the Liverpool vs Chelsea game which will no doubt get fairly heated. Apart from that it’s really just more of the same.

My practitioner of the week is a guy called Jim Cooke. Now there is next to nothing on the internet about the bloke, so it’s going to be slightly tougher than other weeks to get it sounding coherent. The project that I have chosen is called ‘Re-placing Arcadia.’ Now I have had to look up a definition for Arcadia because it tends to crop up quite frequently in contemporary photography. It means: ‘any real or imaginary place offering peace and simplicity.’  The basis of the project is that the artist goes around Europe and photographs example where there is human population or man made influence that has either distracted from, or influenced the surroundings. Some of these images ooze a really strong sense of grandeur for me, especially the one of the massive stone, mountain, boulder looking thing with the small province located just underneath. How have I never seen an image of this place before? It really stood out to me.

Cooke seems to document the way in which man has had an effect on nature. For me though it doesn’t feel like he is trying to create a sense of anger at the encroachment but instead trying to create a feeling of harmony and a symbiotic relationship between the man made and the natural. Its very frustrating that I can’t show you a quality version of the image. I’ve had to scan in from his book and its pretty dire. In the book the images are rich and vibrant, but I guess you’ll get the jist of the grandeur.

Cooke say’s how he like the ‘dichotomy’ of the over powering man made structures to what the location used to look like. I am very tempted to agree with him here as it feels as though there is space for both to coincide and reshape the landscape. This goes against the usual opinion that man made structures are ruining the world we live in, but the way Cooke photographs them makes me see things slightly differently.

That’s enough for this week

Adam

Weekly wordage and Erik Johansson’s work

Look out Cornwall I’m back. It has been a rather pleasant first week back in the bubbling cauldron of pressure that is the photography course here in Falmouth. Things looked to have picked up from where they left off really. Almost everyone I’ve spoken to has said the same thing ‘phwaor didn’t that holiday go quickly, definitely didn’t feel like four weeks.’ I agree with them, it feels like we only had a couple of days back home now.

I started the week off with a return to the infamous tutorial room number 4. It proved to be another fairly positive tutorial as I looked to show the rest of my group the work that I’d produced over the easter break. Most the work was complimented which was good to hear. When questioned on the criteria for the project by the tutor, who hadn’t seen the work since early march, I felt that some of the work fell below the criteria. It takes a new set of eye’s to see what you are trying to achieve and whether you are actually achieving it. It was pointed out that for the aim of trying to convey a sense of time, the images which contained a gradient mask to them worked best. This is was due to the purely visual aspect that when you gradient something in then the image will fade out into the other, making a more seamless transition. I will continue making images in the same way. I now need to focus on the next couple weeks as I look to decide upon the strongest pieces and get them printed up on to a larger scale for the final hand in, this will also involved buying and framing the pieces which I can foresee being highly stressful.

I have sent a couple of test pieces to print at the stores. One of them is an A2 containing a few crops of images to see how they hold to the scaling up and another A3 which will hopefully give me a good sense of what the images will look like on the fine art paper that I have chosen. I’ll collect them next week and I’m looking forward to seeing the results.

Along with these test prints, I have also been trying to finalise the look and design of the book that I want to put forward for the end of the project. Thursday morning saw me going to a talk from a representative of Bob’s Books which is a similar organisation to Blurb. They give you a template to work from and you are to simply place the text and images where you want them to go. It gave a me a bit of a kick up the backside as I realised that I needed to get it done as quickly as possible as the turn around would be stupidly close to my deadline time.

Tuesday afternoon led allowed me to have the first bbq of the year as I headed to a friends house as they whipped out a couple of disposable barbies and after only three hours we ate like kings. Following that with some fifa made for a great day.

Thursday was another day, another tutorial. This time one on one with the head of year. Again I showed what I had done over easter and was given good feedback. An issue was brought up about the title of the project as this would be need to short and sharp and yet definitive and encapsulating. I said that I hadn’t even thought about that which was the truth and so for the last couple of days I’ve been trying to come up with a few that would work. It has a dual purpose as I will also need it go on the front cover of the book when I send it over. It turns out that it is harder you’d think to come up with a title. I’ll hopefully have one by early next week if I can conquer my indecision.

Thursday evening gave me a chance to experience one of the new restaurants to open in Falmouth. It is called the Fire Kitchen which is kind of ironic as it was previously a frozen yoghurt shop called Skoosh that closed down after suffering a fire in the kitchen. The Fire Kitchen does a combo of seafood and burgers. Just reading the menu gave you sense that they were trying to create a friendly atmosphere as they wrote ‘feel free to come into the kitchen and have a chat.’ I mean come on seriously, how many of us can say that when they go to a restaurant for a meal you make a be line for the kitchen to talk to some random chef about his/her day. None. That’s how many. I was tempted to order my normal mussels dish which is my go to to most places in Falmouth, but then I realised I wasn’t sure if could trust this place yet. You never know they could have produced some tiny little ones that wouldn’t have been enough to fill a small child. No, a place needs to earn my trust when it comes to ordering mussels. I plumped with a panko breadcrumb chicken burger with pineapple, chilli jam and cheese. It was really tasty, no complaints over that at all. One thing that we noticed which was a bit cheeky was that you had order chips separately as none of the burgers came with them. Now for those of you who feel like chips are an unwanted added extra then no doubt you’ll be jumping for joy, but for those of us who tend to expect them as a given side with a dish this came as quite a disappointment. The food was tasty and reasonably priced. I just feel as though they may have just bitten off a bit more than they can chew, going into competition against the Food Counter down the other end of the high street which has earned great plaudits for its burgers and rightly so. We’ll have to see how this one plays out. I reckon I’d give it a solid 7/10.

Elsewhere during the week I made a triumphant return to the badminton court with a thoroughly enjoyable session which hardly anyone turned up to so it was a good chance to play as much as possible for a couple of hours. We had some ridiculously long games and which went right down to the wire.

I managed to get a sea swim in this morning before the rain came. Lets just say that is was refreshingly cold. I still don’t understand how the seasoned veterans go in without a wetsuit. I know they do it more regularly but even so the way they just seem to jump in boggles the mind, they make ’em tough down in Cornwall.

My practitioner of the week is a man called Erik Johansson. He is very well known in the photoshop industry for creating pieces that seem to defy reality. The work is photo realistic montages of incredible complexity. Johansson will first draw the piece as pre-visualisation that he wants to make a reality. Once he has done that he will go and photograph the individual elements of the shots. He aims to create situations that use the same lighting as that makes it easier to incorporate the images together. The work can take months to create from first conception to finished product. Being self taught in the ways of both photography and photoshop makes it feel as though there is hope for us all. He classes his work as having a sense of humour to it, which I think is important in photographs. I have chosen Johansson as my practitioner this week because of the intentions he has regarding his viewers. He aims to trick the brain into believing in this new contemporary dream like reality that he creates, even if it is just for the briefest of moments. I like that illusionary aspect of the images. I would say that that is what I am trying to accomplish in my own images yet on a much smaller scale, as I obviously don’t possess the same degree of competency on photoshop. He comments in his TED talk that it is ‘easier to create than find a place.’ In some regards yes. The place you need may not be easily accessible so why not create one that is better than real life. I think the ones that work best are the pieces that border on being believable, that have enough of an element of truth to them. The more surreal ones are superb as well and hugely time consuming and are also comprised of hundreds of layers on photoshop, but those are just the ones I personally prefer.

Right that is enough for this week.

Adam

A very Brough outline of her work

Hello everyone, I hope you’ve all had a good week. My week has been a fairly busy one. I’ll start off from last sunday just after my last blog post and work from there in a fairly routine chronological order as per the norm.

The reason I’ve overlapped my weeks is due to the decision I made to include the the trip to the cinema that we embarked upon last sunday afternoon. For us in Falmouth the cinema is situated within easy walking distance and we don’t really seem to take advantage of that. We went to watch the ‘Lego Movie’, and before you all say ‘what are you… like four?,’ bare with me as I try and argue for it. Now you may see it as a kids film, but I personally think it was so much more. Obviously the whole film is just one big advertisement for Lego itself, (maybe the sales are down slightly) but it is also a real trip down memory lane and pumped full of nostalgia for anyone who used to play with Lego. It basically praises those of us of used to use the blocks to create whatever we wanted the ones who broke away from the instruction booklet that came with the packs, and actually used their imaginations to the fullest. In the film the ‘master builders’ see through the normal way of building Lego and can see the blocks in a completely new way. Not only does it try and sell this way of experimentation but the film is also very humorous, with many great lines being said. With a fairly big name cast including Morgan Freeman, Jonah Hill and Will Ferrell its turns out to be one of the clichéd movies similar to something like the original Shrek that has elements for both kids and adults. For a one trip to the cinema we all came away feeling pretty happy, I wouldn’t however buy the DVD as the jokes were good because you didn’t see them coming.

Right, blimey, that was just sunday afternoon. Onto monday, the day basically consisted of a group tutorial, or at least that’s all I can remember of it. The tutorial went well as I showed the pieces that I put on the blog last week to the rest of my group of peers. The work was met with interest and was spoken about in a confidence boosting manner. The point was made that the ones with both black and white and then colour on top worked better in terms of getting across the sense of time passing. But then it ws countered by another saying the fading of colour to colour was also working well.

Monday evening saw my house mate and myself take a trip to truro to watch another opera. Having watched plenty of episodes of ‘Frasier’ in which he seems to constantly be at one,  I was intruiged to see how the whole opera thing worked. We went and saw one before christmas and thought it was pretty good, so went again on monday evening to see if the last one had been a one off. Turns out it wasn’t and the second one was even better than the first. Who’d have thought it ay?

The rest of Monday and then Tuesday was dedicated to creating new pieces as I was told I would need a heck of a lot more of the montages for the final hand in and show. Tuesday evening for me was a return to badminton on a social level, and it was superb, I made sure that I gave 110% for the whole three hours and it paid off massively in the way I played. By far and a way one of the best sessions I’ve had in recent memory. It was tainted slightly by the fact that we have only 4 more sessions to run through before the end of the season which was a bit of a blow. For those of you who read weekly know that badminton for me has become a major part of the week, as well as knowing that my uni experience will shortly be coming to end, you always have in the back of your head the thought that it is coming to end. I’ll miss the badminton lot and with the amount of third years that are leaving it this year I’m sure it won’t quite be the same without us next year.

I worked as an ambassador for the university on wednesday as it was that time of year again when the applicants come down with the heavy portfolio cases and beads of nervous sweat on theirs brows for the interview process. I worked giving tours of the accommodation and the photography building on campus and basically praising it all in any way that could. I did this whilst also talking to the applicants asking any questions they had and generally trying to make sure they knew what was coming and not to be too nervous, which is easier said than done sometimes. It took me back to my interview day and how bloody nerve racking the whole process is. It’s surprisingly hard to answer the question ‘why do you want to study photography?’ when you’re 18 years old. You’re not really sure apart from having a passion for it  and getting enjoyment out of it in college its pretty hard to say where you want to be in the future. Even harder still is ‘why falmouth?’ ‘Umm the facilities are really good, and the course looks like the right one for me.’ The amount of times they must have heard answers similar to these is probably quite a lot. Working as an ambassador is a pretty good thing to do and I recommend that the second and first years reading this do get involved in the scheme.

Thursday I booked another 1-2-1 with my main tutor Deb. She wanted to see me before we broke up for easter to check that I was going down the right track with my work and see if I had any queries. I showed her the new work that I had done earlier in the week, which is also what I am going to put on the blog this week and she seemed to genuinely like them.

Friday my dad came down and we went and had a little explore of some of the places that we hadn’t been in cornwall yet. Now I’ve been going since I was about 4 years old and my dad about 25 years or so before I was born, so the number of places that we haven’t been to is exceedingly small. Nonetheless we ended up going to a town called Stithians which was an old mining town and one of the best preserved ones. The town itself though is inland and therefore doesn’t get any money from the tourist industry that is predominantly coastal based and so is incredibly run down and desolate. Driving through it we hardly saw another human being.

Anyway we travelled back yesterday and I am now home for a month. Most other uni’s don’t finish for another 3 weeks so I am going to have keep myself busy until others start arriving back.

The practitioner of the week is one that I mention a couple of weeks or so ago called Jenny Brough. Its is going to be another fairly short segment simply due to her genre of photography, which is fashion, which I don’t really have clue about. So for this week I’ll bumble my way through and hope that some of what I say is vaguely accurate.

Brough was a former student down in Falmouth and came and gave a refreshingly honest talk at during our symposium week a few weeks ago. Her story is fairly interesting as it gave us all an insight into the kind of slog you have to go through in order to get to where you want to be after uni finishes. Having graduated Brough took a year or so to get herself together to think about what she wanted to do, to develop an idea of a style. She got herself a part time job and then from there pushed on to what she wanted to to photographically. She then went and worked as an assistant for first Rankin for a short period of time and gained valuable experience and then went and worked for another practitioner who’s name escapes me. All the while she was having to sofa surf her way around London to get to where she wanted to be. At the end of her work for the guy I can’t remember the name of she was allowed to use his studio for her own fashion shoot. Having done the shoot, that work then got picked up and placed in a publication. From there things have gone from strength to strength for Brough, and she now does fashion shoots all over the world, recently going to New York for her first shoot over there.

Her work has a very strong, confident and bold style to it. On a personal level I think all the models look really harsh and menacing and I know that there is a lot more to it than I know, but I don’t think I’ll ever understand the clothing choices that the stylist make in fashion shoots. I assume they are going to the experimental, out there approach.  At the end of the day though I guess they are trying to sell a product and so have to make it all seem as appealing as possible. Underlying all of Brough’s work is a sense of beauty and form as she looks to accentuate the male and female forms.

That’s enough for this week, thanks for reading! The first three images are my newest pieces and then the there are six fashion shots form Jenny Brough, who, I should also mention is one of the nicest photographers I’ve spoken to about their work.

Adam

You’ve got to check out John Goto

Another week rolls around, and there’s good reason to be excited down here in Cornwall, the sun has finally decided to show itself again. Friday was the first day of the year on which we could legitimately play the ELO song Mr. Blue sky; and boy did we play it loud.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were incredibly tough sledging as confidence levels took on an all time low. Being in third year is a stressful experience as everything you now produce, you feel, has to be the constantly the best work that you’ve produced at uni. Always in the back of your mind is the end of year show and you want to hang something that is both strong visually and also interesting. I spent the three days trying to create some of my own work, using the old postcards that I’ve bought as the base background images while forming digital composites with the images that I myself have taken on top. If I’m honest I was fairly pleased with the way in which the pieces turned out.

Thursday led to me having a tutorial with the tutors in order to seek approval for the direction in which I was taking the project forward. It proved to be quite informative, as she helped me to understand a way in which to look at my work conceptually in a contemporary scenario. We spoke about how the images are talking about the sense of time and memory. We feel like we see memories vividly but really over time they fade and some parts can become distorted. Memories of places are usually weighted negatively or positively depending on how the experience with the place in question went. Sometimes its possible to have ideas and memories blend into one another, as I for one tend not to think of memories as stills but rather in a more cinematic way, like replaying parts of a film. (I realise I used the word memories close to a thousand times in the last two sentences). Working in this form of montage I was wary of mimicking the style of the 1920’s-40’s Dadaist movement by artists such as a the previously written about John Heartfield or Hannah Hoch. That style appears to be very surreal and bizarre as you see many many images spliced together to create one larger piece of work. As much as I admire the work that was produced in that time period I wanted my own to be less busy visually, more sedate, with an air of understated majesty. I have been looking to mainly play on the way one vision can merge into another and have therefore been experimenting with the way that that can be achieved and I have found that using pathways and lines to be the most effective of doing so. As the pathway leads from past to a new present, the memories of a place get overwritten and replaced by the small incremental changes that occur in the world that surrounds us. In order to create my images I have decided to try and allow some elements of the older postcards images to flow through into my own images, and to make sure that there is a distinctive way of telling where one boundary of an image ends I decided to include the edge of the images so that there is always a faded square visible in the images to denote the separation.

Friday was music filled as we enjoyed the weather listened to some tunes. In the evening I had another badminton match, annoyingly it was against the team at the top of the table and we lost quite comfortably. So ends the winning streak of two weeks. I didn’t play anyway near to the standard that I wanted to either which was again annoying. After that defeat the only student way I could think of was to drown in the sorrows and so went out into town with some of the people from badminton. A good night was had by all. I don’t think you could ever class a night that includes table fussball as a bad one.

Yesterday was a glorious sunny day so a trip to the beach felt necessary. You would never have guessed that it was early march by the way the people were crammed onto Gylly beach. The evening entailed the badminton AGM, which is basically a way of making sure that the club continues in good hands next year. We elected new captains and what not, and I feel that the club will be even stronger next year.

My practitioner of the week is a man called John Goto. Goto creates montage photographic images that have a satirical edge to them. His work is not out and out seamless merging of two or three places but is instead fitted together in a far more obvious and noticeable manner. Yet as the viewer see’s the work they are immediately able to relate to the image and it suddenly doesn’t matter how obvious the combination may be, but rather focuses on how believable the situation is. The reason I personally like Goto’s work is down to the way in which he includes classical architecture into one of his projects. ‘Navigating by Hesperus’ looks at the way the world can be created through the power of imagination. He creates images of what he believes America looks like from previous imagery he has seen or literature that he has read. The results of this are really interesting to look at as we can see elements of American cities in the work and yet find it laughable at some of the inclusions that he puts in the work. There is a weird sense of juxtaposition in the images as we see modern qualities, through maybe the architecture, and the square digital, pixel-esque blocks, which are meant to represent the way in which the mind has gaps in the memory, or at least that’s what I’ve read them as, they could also be just a reference to the whole side of digital creation, reminding the viewer of the origins of the work.

However, my favourite series that he has done is one entitled ‘High Summer’, which is where I feel I have adopted the style of my current work from. The series is comprised of images that look at bringing in elements of early beautiful landscape painting while including modern land use elements too. The images for me are really balanced pieces that raise questions regarding the current state of the land we live in, while also reminding us of how magnificent it was, still is, and can be in the future. I’m particularly enamoured by the inclusion of the classical architecture as I said previously, as I see it as a strong addition to the work, and I personally don’t get tired of viewing it, as the buildings mirror the beauty of the landscape.

I’m going to include lots of images today, some from both of Goto’s projects I have just spoken about and some of own current work.

A big thank you to those of you still reading SIX MONTHS in since I started writing the blog.

Have a dandy week.

Adam