The evolution of my Final Major Project continues at some pace and I am starting to see a clear direction that I want to take. However given the amount of changes already taking place I guess I need to be prepared for a few more switches in direction before the project is finally done and dusted.
Shared my current work in progress with a new tutor this week and it was great to get a new perspective on the work. Whilst I had been thinking that my work was illustrating the relationship between photography and music, it became apparent that it is more about love, death and relationships. Whilst I could admit this was deliberate on my part, the reality is that this has naturally evolved through my choice of lyrics, I do have a thing for 'dark' love songs, and trying to create still life images that represent each song.
I can see that my FMP is about symbology, using the iconography of flowers, to bring to life the emotions and sentiment evoked from each chosen song. I intend to delve deeper into this and start planning the individual shots more with greater thought given to all of the elements. This is not just about producing stunning shots of beautiful flowers, to achieve MA quality work I need to add more layers of meaning into each image.
I have been encouraged to continue experimenting with different types of images and try not to get too fixed at this stage on one particular style. This will prove a challenge as I am really keen that the images work together as a body of work and therefore share the same DNA of editing, but I will look to explore and experiment as much as I can and will keep the edit of each image open in Photoshop so that further alterations can be made.
I do however recognise that there has already been a high amount of experimenting taking place and that whilst I now have in excess of 20 images taken these will not all feature in the final work. In fact my current work in progress has 16 images and lyrics and the hard reality is that I do need to cull this back to the ones that really do work with the theme I am now going with. As a result I have identified a strong 8 images that I would be happy to see in my final FMP.
In terms of how many should appear in the final submission, this is very much down to personal choice, but I have a current goal of 21 that I think could work. The number 21 has a great deal of symbology itself and in a number of cultures represents a life cycle and resurrection which brings a further link to my work of love and death.
I will be researching other practitioners to draw inspiration from their work with still life photography including Taryn Simons, Sarah Jones, Ori Gersht and Valerie Belin.