PERSONAL PROJECT
The brief
Continue working on your personal project and produce a photo essay of 15 images. Your work should demonstrate good research, a methodical approach and a wider scope than previous assignment work.
Decide on the best submission format for your work. Discuss your ideas with your tutor while you do the projects and exercises in Part Five. (Open College of the Arts, 2014:120)
Background information:
This personal project spans a year of reflection on the village of Newport (Tredraeth) Pembrokeshire. At the beginning of this time I was a second home owner, “exiled” from the village by the pandemic lockdown, observing the “temperature” of the place from afar. Mid way through the year I relocated there permanently. I have been an insider/outsider observer of the place for many years, known and accepted by many. Now that I have become a local, other’s experience tells me that it will take me years to be recognised as such.
As with everything this year, emotions have magnified, and voices have become louder. To rationalise what I was reading on social media and the press, I researched for facts to seek the cultural, political, social, and economic truths about the impact of visitors and second homeowners to this rural area, during the pandemic lockdown, and more generally as well.
Having discovered my “truth” I considered how to share this visually. My background reading of those such as Sekula, Tagg, Berger, Levi Strauss and Borge, increased my awareness that photographs are only representations of reality, part captured in the moment and the rest supplied by the photographer. Whilst I carry the responsibility and accountability of a documentary photographer to present reality, in this story I present various layers of truth, material, moral, impression and form. Images are never neutral, but having synthesised much information, as well as emotion, I have recorded and presented the truth as I understand it. I have recorded what my eyes saw. The text that accompanies the images is to support the truths I have discovered, rather than appropriate the images, as well as to provoke thoughts.
Photographs are not predictable communicators “they cannot carry meanings in any straightforward way” (Company, 202:8), but I have announced my path to this truth, and my position in it, though do hope that viewers will question the truths that I share.
References:
Campany, D. (2020) On Photographs. London: Thames and Hudson.
Open College of the Arts (2014) Photography 2: Documentary-Fact and Fiction (Course Manual). Barnsley: Open College of the Arts.
Artist statement:
This work is a personal reflection on aspects of a village, over a year. Though this has been an unusual time, the feelings and opinions felt and expressed, are simply magnifications of continued underlying tensions between locals and visiting outsiders. I have sought to uncover the truths that lie beneath these emotions, and share them here. These layers of truths are presented with integrity and research, though just as I have formed my own relationship with them, so may you.
Photography 2: Documentary 