Square Mile: Communicating about me

The brief says that the assignment must “communicate something about you: your interests, motivations and ambitions for your photography”.

To help me determine what I wanted to communicate about myself, I reflected on this and again used the “mind-mapping” technique (diagram not shown) to identify what I saw as key aspects of my personality that I wanted to communicate.

In summary, my interests include hillwalking and scuba diving (the latter is hard to incorporate directly into this). These are linked by an interest in nature and the natural environment. My other large area of interest is my family and friends. Through my professional work I have an interest in people generally and their interests and background.

I think the theme linking this is an interest in heritage, why and how we come to be where we are, and in terms of our environment, what has created what we see – the forces of nature and of people.

In terms of photography, I started originally to use it to document what I have done and where I have been, however I recognise that I aspire to more and want it to mean something to me (and hopefully others). One of my personality traits I am aware of is perfectionism and I enjoy the technical aspects of photography, but am never satisfied with the outcome so want to better understand the essential aspects of an image to make it good.

My aim with the assignment is to try and show

• why and how we come to be where we are
• what has created what we see
• and show the forces of nature and of people on our environment

Next Steps:

In this and my last blog post I believe I have set out how I intend to approach the assignment and what I want it to show. I now need to plan the images that will do this. To this end I will:

• Plan locations and possible images based on my knowledge of the area
• Research the work of other photographers and artists whose work addresses this