EYV Zoom Meeting: 21 May 2019

EYV Zoom Meeting 21 May 2019: Photography is Simple

Led by Robert Bloomfield

This was the second of these meetings I have been able to attend and found the previous one very helpful but omitted to keep notes and record it here on my learning log!!

The meetings are described as:

“This is a new, supportive space for students to meet and share course experiences with each other and the Unit Leader, and to ask any burning questions.”

The topic for this meeting was “Photography is Simple”, the title of the fifth and last assignment on EYV.

I had not had the opportunity to give much thought to this as it is some time in the future and in recent months I have had an enforced gap in my studies for the course. My preliminary thoughts and approach on the subject was to look at the dictionary definition of “simple”. This definition includes two uses of the word “simple” which encompass

• easily understood or done and presenting no difficulty and
• plain, basic or uncomplicated in form nature or design

So, for example, the work of and artist like Rachael Talibard is not easily created – she goes to great lengths to make her images of storms, both in the planning and her positioning to make the image. However the images appear easy to understand – they are just what they appear, photographs of waves making patterns. On the other hand, the work of someone like Guy Bourdin may be easier to create but with its basis in surrealism is more difficult to understand.

In the meeting I presented this idea, and appeared to have some support for that view.
Other concepts were introduced by Robert Bloomfield with which I was not familiar and fnding out more about these are my objectives to do more work on.

The most significant of these ideas for me was the concept of photography as a mirror or window. In the former the photographer projects himself to the world (Robert associated the work of Francesca Woodman with this approach) and in the latter the world is “explored in all its presence and reality” – a concept attributed to Paul Graham.

The other major learning experience for me was the discovery of the course reading list! As it was at the end of the notes and not referred to earlier, I had not seen it up to now. My next work is to look at some of the suggested works from this.