It was huge fun to collaborate with Corin Rossouw, Howard Pratt and Rob Jones, on a short multimedia project, ‘The Journey‘.
The project forced me to think again about the familiar – something very important to my documentary work. And it also forced me to consider what I could properly add of value, especially as I joined the project late. Thank you to Corin, Howard and Rob for including me!
Here’s the statement I wrote:
I make this trip all the time – across Lansdown, by the Race Course, and into Bath. And I have done for almost 18 years. It’s only a few miles, and although I can’t say Bath is my favourite place to photograph, it is a fun, vibrant and cosmopolitan town.
I enjoy street photography, and being a busy tourist destination, Bath is usually bustling with locals, tourist and buskers – in all weathers and all seasons. Yet the journey from home to the Abbey, in the centre of the city, just goes past without much thought. I sometimes think the car could drive itself!
For this project, I wanted to photograph some of what I am not usually seeing. I suspect newcomers to the town would see the signs straightaway. But I normally don’t. There are signs everywhere, and over the years seem to multiply exponentially. Traffic signs. Warning signs. Advertising signs. Road Work signs.
The signs tell a different story about my home town. They fit comfortably in the famous spaces that I do see and photograph, yet somehow they are disconnected and exist in their own space. It also seemed to me that this approach was different to the plans the other members of the team had, so hopefully it complements their work, too.
The Video we made is on YouTube
And the Presentation we gave about it is The Journey
We also made a group summary of the collaboration learning:
- each collaborator used their own expertise such as stills / time lapse / street photography / urban landscape / rural landscape / video / software
- communications – started during F2F weekend; basic theme and methods were established prior to leaving for home
- used conferences on Canvas to communicate and set our deadlines and stay on track
- excellent enthusiasm and engagement by the team
- Time was main pressure to work around each other’s commitments
- Time taken up to travel back from F2F meant half a week to achieve the required output
- Fighting poor weather conditions for photo taking 🙂
All in all, a great week (again!)