I've not been feeling very well, these past few days. I had a bit of an eating binge on Tuesday, which predictably made me feel fat, ugly and horrible, and also rather depressed. I cheered up a bit last night when I went to the pub quiz with Phil, Tom and Rogan, who also brought his flatmate Chris along. It was an Irish themed quiz, it being St Patrick's Day and all, so I took advantage of my connections with Rory and rang him to ask for some of the answers. We still only scored 30 (out of 40) though.
Our tutor gave us the photography exam papers on Tuesday. It's the same paper for both the first years and second years, and for everyone doing an art and design course - fine art, photography, textiles, graphic design, sculpture and so on. Thus not all of the options are too feasible using photography, but some are appropriate to all mediums. There are 20 options to choose from, we have to select one. We have six weeks preparation, 5 hours of execution. Some of the more interesting options are: on the edge; twilight; recessed space; windows; legs; interiors; shadows. Some other choices, whose inclusion is frankly bewildering, are: opaque; event; acquired; figure(s) with ladder. Note it doesn't say figure with ladder(s) - would you lose marks for including more than one ladder?
I was considering taking many photographs of people, animals and furniture, anything which could be said to have a leg, and then printing them, cutting them out, and swapping the legs around, so you get tables wearing slippers and so on. I also thought about the window option. I wondered about taking photographs of what can be seen through a range of windows - like those belonging to a council house, to a middle class house, to an office block etc. These would then be mounted on stiff white card, and I'd make a pair of "curtains" to fit around the photograph, appropriate to the setting it was depicting. Though I may draw the line at Venetian blinds. I thought last night about expanding on this to also photographing the building whose windows I'd be using, and attaching those shots to the back of the card, to allow for some context. However I could completely change my mind and do a different theme altogether. "Interiors" is a very wide-ranging option - anything which is inside a building counts. Though I did think about photographing items in the street which would normally be found inside a building but have been left outside. For example, there's a duvet laying in the street I walk down to get to the bus stop, and on a road close to Swarthmore, you can find a table with a computer monitor on it in someone's garden. And then there's "shadow". All photographs are comprised solely of light and shadow, and some very arty things can be done using shadows. And that's just taking "shadow" at it's first meaning. There's more than one use for all these words, which is one of the wonderful things about art. However in this situation, it's providing so much choice I can't decide which to pick, and that's something I need to decide on fairly quickly.
14:20
