Well here we are Week 9 and the Oral Presentation has been submitted (redirects to my portfolio site).

Fingers crossed for good luck. Best wishes to fellow students. This is our first assessment. There are two more during August (which begins tomorrow. Where does the time go when you are engaged in something like this).

I’ve been catching up with the Guest Presentations on research theory and abstract photography. In the first Welby’s presentation challenged my thinking as of course I thought I already knew plenty on the subject.

Welby presented a broad range of methods. broader than the formal methods I’d previously learned.

He focussed on methodologies appropraite to the arts. Thank you, Welby.

I have been working through the course in reverse order while catching up from being away on my project.

I was quietly provoked by the Finnish Abstract work presented by Laura Nissenen. The student audience had been given direction earlier in the course to find something meaningful in Abstract if they were going to continue with it. In a sense this put them off continuing. Laura’s advice was to go ahead anyway and follow one’s path. In my case I’m on an
earlier module. Did I want to be hammering out the argument in favour of abstract work in the future modules? While work should continue to evolve (and intuitively is the word on the street following Sian’s recent lecture), then I probably need to be applying constraints at the soonest.
Maybe Abstract, in my case, is self-involved and what I do needs to reach out more. I intend to run Abstract and Close-up photography side by side on my proposed project. These methods are creative and stand-in for not being able to recreate large scale scenes from France and Flanders and as a research question and benchmark these methods on a defined narrative project already researched. I know at the outset, the outcome cannot be definitive, but it seems increasing more so with the time that it is my destiny, after all, to do this work. I would hope any failings would not be critical. and that to make findings more widely definitive continuation of this research would need to take place in a variety of other contexts than my historical, anthropological one.