I finally got around to working through some ‘road trip’ photography from my last Cambodia visit. When Simeth and I were driving north, I decided to take a series from the car – rough, blurred in some cases – with a view later to creating some kind of sequence which evoked motion.
I decided to a series with layers of 3 images – photographs taken fairly close to each other on the road. I have used layered work lot before, both in artwork and photography, but not so far much in the MA program. There is always a danger that the work is trite, too manipulated and so forth. the last thing I want is to get into some kind of’ arty-for-arts-sake’ derivative work.
But in this case I found the the result was promising, suggesting the cacophony of sound and images as the car flew along.
No-one drives slowly in Cambodia, even in the towns along the way (been guilty of that, myself). In any event, I quite like the end result.
Mick Yates. 2019. Road Trip, Anlong Veng.
There is a gallery of the images here.
However, I could see that this might also be an interesting way to illustrate ‘Unfinished Stories’, with voice over and music. Using voice and video is going to be part of the BRLSI installation, so experimentation is needed.
I created this.
The idea was to continue working with paradox – modern images combined with painful historical personal stories. And the music has to sit somewhere in the middle. Gem thought it might be too upbeat – which is fair comment. But I do not want it to be macabre and ‘faux-horror-story’.
I think the end result hangs together, and I’ll seek feedback from others.