Overall my tutor seemed happy with the images but wasn’t happy with the edit. He recommended that I review the work by Allan Sekula ‘Fish Story’, ‘Let there be light: The Rwanda project 1994-1998’ by Alfredo Jaar and any of the books by John Berger and Jean Mohr. Notes of this process can be found in my Work in Progress blog here. The main issues seemed to be deciding on what I was trying to say.
With this in mind I removed all the images from the draft book and put them back on the wall:
Mixing them up allowed me to try and remove the current edit. I also returned to the feedback I had received and how one person had said that they felt I had given her too much, she wanted to work for the narrative. A number had commented that larger image formats would also work.
I knew that I wanted to still keep the black and white images as a representation of the male and location and so as hard as it was, I dropped a number of the images I was really pleased with but formed a new start:
The location/place is all about the sea. It’s a hard life and now this is where the new edit started (but didn’t finish). I then looked at the colour images and formed themes around location, hands, working, products and portraits:
It was then a case of clearly a space and selecting, placing, rejecting and even returning to some of my original images to find the right one to fit. I did reject all of the triptychs and reprocess a number of images. The map has also been dropped and I have added a traditional Māori quote and translation. The PowerPoint presentation version can be found here and video here. This also includes the drafts produced prior to final edit.
I presented the re-edit to the Documentary forum that I attend and from the OCA Student forum and the comments are here
Additional Professional feedback was also obtained and this can be found here.
I decided that I needed to also produce a draft book and so worked with a printer to produce the images and then made the draft book which can be seen here.
To submit I decided that the best way to show these images as I couldn’t provide prints or the book was to design a new website and that can be found here
Michele Usher 