Other Students Documentary work
Not Our Time By Penny Watson
The work is about Pennys Grandmother, her blog can be seen here..
And also Chris white and Maggie Milner are talking about it here...
Behind the Scenes By Beth Aston
This is about her own body image, this is not really my favourite type of work although I can appreciate the photos. It isn't something I would ever chose to do. But it always interests me what people chose to pick as their subject. Its very hard to be original.
A Dozen Eggs by Harry Pearce
This is his view of a family album of his family and siblings. Again its a good idea and it looks like he has different angles on his pictures.
I like these pictures and they are very unglamorous with a sense of humour about them and for their family a good collection of the 'tribe'..
His website link is here...
Feet by Omar Camilleri
Omars web page can be seen here...
I didnt personally feel that this collection photos of feet was documentary, maybe I was missing the point, but I was getting confused looking at these as I wouldnt have chosen all pictures of the same thing as telling a story.
Why FEET? This is an original project which will bring out the diversities of life and at the same time it reflects today’s realities and challenges. Any theme is a challenge for any artist. And any theme can be a source of inspiration.
FEET – is an interesting theme that surely provoked the participating artists to look at their creativity from a different angle, with beautiful and surprising results. A painter-artist, Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci and a Photographer-artist Omar Camilleri were brought together by Josephine Vassallo, who instigated this event and together, three people from different spheres and professions had to see and interpret reality through the concept and visual parameters of ‘feet’.
The installation is a path between death-rebirth-birth. A continuous passage, a continuous pilgrimage leading to what one may believe in. The photo material was carefully chosen to reflect this particular element. As in nature which is full of cylical repetitions, the photo development underlines similarly this cyclic character. One keeps on toiling and getting back onto a similar position of toil, sufferance and death. Toiling, life, love, death, birth, toiling, life, love, death, rebirth, toiling, life, love, death, rebirth. The work, a cooperation between three individuals stemming from different fields and beliefs succeeded to synthesise their artistic differences in one organic entity. Josephine with her pragmatic-managerial skills and acute artistic eye, with Giuseppe’s philosophical-artistic stubbornness, coupled with Omar’s love of technical perfection, all went into this fascinating
result. The installation is the result of more than three months of love and work—more than three thousand photographs were taken, – discussions, convincing, arguments and great solidarity – from which ninety were shortlisted, and further on 27 chosen. These 27 had to tell a story and as in life the story cannot be just a nice linear narrative, the story as in life has to have its distortions, its dead-ends, its sufferance. Artistically the method chosen was to install the works within a Maltese festa form i.e. within a ‘pavaljun’ form. Each pavaljun tells a story, sometimes in a sharp clear way, sometimes in a strange bizarre way and sometimes in a contorted way, as life itself is clear, contorted and bizarre. Each ‘pavaljun’ leads onto the other until a whole cycle with all its repetitions becomes manifest.
The installation tried to amalgamate the aesthetic element with the philosophical-spiritual task. Both had to be integrally and organically linked. Neither the aesthetic nor the philosophical-spiritual side had the right to overpower the other. Both are vitally necessary to create a work that must have meaning, existential meaning.
FEET is being brought to you thanks to the support of Bank of Valletta, Kinnie, Salvo Grima, The Merchants Street Business Community, Notte Bianca and Ladybird Organic Farm.
The Dad Project - by Briony Campbell
This is her time prior to her dads death, as said is both personal and universal. Her web page can be seen here.. here...
I found this hard to read and view, and I don't know if i would have taken such pictures of my own father for a project but I am moved and they have definitely had an effect on me.
100th Street by Tanya Ahmed
You can listen to Tanya talking about her project here..
and listen to Maggy Milner also discussing this here ...
In the 1960 Bruce Davidson photograph a block in East Harlem - 40 years later Tanya Ahmed returned to the street to photograph the new residents.
I really like this idea, returning to a project and finding a whole new set of images, new people and new stories.
BJP online - with a little help from my friends ...
www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/feature/1936101/crowd-funding-little-help-friends
Oca Crowd Funding ....
http://www.weareoca.com/photography/crowd-funding/ here ..
Had Jacob Riis been born in the age of the Internet he may well have invented crowd funding. As a photographer committed to bring about social change, as Miles Orvell noted in his book American Photography, the late-19th-century photographer used his images to influence public opinion and as an instrument for direct appeal. Riis was a dedicated social documentary photographer; he epitomised the concerned photojournalist committed to a noble cause. Thanks to recent crowd-funding strategies such as those offered by Kickstarter it seems to me that we are finally coming full circle, going back to the very essence of documentary more than one hundred years after photographers like Jacob Riis lay the foundations of the genre.
Launched in 2009 as a web platform for funding personal creative projects,Kickstarter is the original crowd-funding concept. Thanks to Kickstarterphotographer Pete Brook has been able to raise nearly $8,000 for his Prison Photography project. A worthwhile cause of universal social appeal, coupled with an intelligent marketing strategy, will allow Brook to develop his project and, like Riis, put pressure through public opinion and raise awareness of the social issues he is concerned with. Pete Brook’s pitch is sophisticated and extremely well conceived. By engaging award-winning photographers he made sure that the web worked for him doing what it does best: creating viral connections, disseminating information. By tapping the collective conscience, that boiling pot full of conflicting feelings about ‘the other’, and offering attractive consumer goods as ‘rewards’ (limited editions prints, signed prints, books on the project, etc…) Brook has enticed 142 people so far to support him financially. Kickstarter projects are only funded if the fundraising target is met. Amazon manages donations but no money exchanges hands until the deadline for raising funds is over. It is only then that Kickstarter and Amazon get their commission – 5% and 3-5% respectively. So simple, so effective. Here in the UK WeFund has been live for nearly 1 year. As the first UK-based crowd-funding platform for creative projects it has had great success and has helped to fund many worthwhile projects.
Earlier this year Empash.is, a specialist photojournalism crowd-funding forum, was launched. As a platform to bring an audience and a source of funding for photojournalists, Emphas.is is a direct-action solution to the financial crisis that photojournalism is facing. Engaged, long-term documentary projects, traditionally difficult to finance, have a new channel for raising funds. Emphas.is deals with donations and takes 15% commission for operational costs if the bid is successful – projects have to reach 100% or more of its fundraising target.
The benefits of crowd-funding platforms for photography projects are pretty obvious. Not only do they provide with a realistic source of financial support but they also open new forums for documentary photography. But most importantly, they are helping to redefine the concept of ‘professional’ photography: professional work reaches its intended audience. Whether that is done for profit or not is not necessarily the issue. For the traditionalists of you reading this and choking as a result of my statement please bear in mind that a great deal of the most inspiring photographic work being done out there, that which truly brings about social change, is actually done on a non-for-profit basis – think about any of the documentary awards such as the W.E.Smith Memorial Fund, or the Alexia Foundation Award.
So far so good. Now that Kickstarter and Emphas.is are in place we wonder how come similar solutions weren’t conceived a decade ago. But is it all truly good though? Or is there a caveat somewhere? I’m concerned that the boundary between that which is of public interest and has universal appeal and that which is comparatively trivial and self-indulgent may be dangerously blurred in crowd-funding. You only have to browse the eclectic range of bids on Kickstarter andWeFund to realise that. But I suppose that web users are savvy enough to tell a genuine bid from a fanciful project. However, what really preoccupies me is what happens to all the visual material generated before and during the crowd-funded projects. Specifically, whether successful documentary bidders, having been funded, may decide to publicise their work on a pro-bono basis. The result would be a surplus of quality and free documentary work. In other words, a panacea for editors.
Which brings me back to the concept of ‘professional’ work. 15 years ago professional and commercial would have gone hand-in-hand. Nowadays that is not the case anymore. Work can be professional even if its non-commercial. The quality of the work that you can see inEmphas.is, the funds it can raise, and the wide audience it reaches out are good evidence of it. I’m not saying that is necessarily good, but it’s an inevitable side effect of the web.
Digital democratised photography and crowd-funding is democratising documentary. It all makes sense to me.
