I have received my feedback for Assignment Two and the message seems to be broadly along the lines of ‘Young Mr Grace’ from “Are Your Being Served?”, who used to visit the Grace Bros store with his voluptuous (not sure if that word is acceptable these days!!) nurse and announce “You’re all doing very well!”.  Not that I would compare Clive with ‘Young Mr Grace’, of course!

A little more seriously, the feedback is that I seem to be heading in the right direction so keep on with it.  I’m happy with that and also agree with the more significant point from the feedback, which is that I will, eventually, need to be able to present and explain a more direct and coherent link with the theoretical context in Contextual Studies.  I am beginning to see some broad direction in that but it needs more focus and some drilling down into how it specifically links with my projects.  Those reflections are, however, for elsewhere.

One point worth recording here is that I am beginning to sense that the two broad project areas – loosely defined as the Self-Portraits and the Studio Work – are actually not so different from each other, and might turn out to be closely related aspects of the same overall project.  Photography seems to work in creative spaces that are ideal for subversion and avant-gard questioning of the ‘norms’ associated with visual art and culture.  Digital developments make the ground beneath those norms seem even less secure.  All the images that I have been producing seem to work in this (good grief, I am about to borrow a phrase from the world of cricket! Geoffrey Boycott no less!) ‘corridor of uncertainty’.  Images that may evoke the ‘real’, that may quote from the familiar forms of cultural representation, which may tempt the viewer to look and reflect, but which, fundamentally, have no meaning.  At this stage, I don’t want to go any further than those general observations.  I have some notions of where this is taking me but it is through more reading and reflection in my Contextual Studies that I may hope to progress.

At which point, quietly congratulating myself on managing to quote from “Are You Being Served?” and “Test Match Special” in one short blog post, I will get my nose into some books!