Inspiration

I recently visited the Photographers Gallery in London. We were lucky to see the exhibition 'fresh faced & wild eyed 2010', which is work by recent graduates - an incredible range and variety if images. Most were sets, from two or 3 works up to about a dozen photos. All were inspirational and thought provoking and some were particularly clever and original!

I was particularly taken by the work of Simone Koch (http://www.simonekoch.co.uk/wahl.html). Her piece 'But we must cultivate our Garden' was really excellent - quirky images, mixture of people and place, closeups and abstracts; it really made me think about what made a set of images clever. I hope to be able to do something vaguely similar with my final assignment for TAOP, not in terms of including people in so many images, but taking photos that are not obvious and making them interesting.

We also saw Briony Campbell talking at the Friday lunchtime talk. Her work 'The dad project' was moving and impressive, though I thought the photos didn't tell enough of the story - the captions were needed which I think is a bit unfortunate. I have seen similar works, both online and at a visit to FOAM gallery in Amsterdam. To take such a personal experience (a relative with a terminal illness) and photograph it takes some guts, and she said that it had helped her grieving experience. I'm not sure it's the most original piece of work however, though it certainly was very touching.

I think those students who chose just a few images to present often resulted in stronger impact for me - sometimes it's difficult to make a choice between 'favourite' images, and I think this is actually a very important part of the process of photography (something I myself struggle with at times). But it also distills down the piece of work into the key images and it you can't get your message across in those images then perhaps the work is not strong enough? Another photographer whos work was very impressive and memorable was Anna Linderstam, who had her subjects hypnotised and then photographed them in that state. The massive triptych that results is visually stunning and very effective.