I’ve found this week’s topic to have been very challenging in terms of how I approach photography and how I’ve looked at my own work previously. I’m definitely not used to the amount of deliberate thought and reflection that’s required. Having a design agency background I am very used to the constant pace to creative work broken down into actions and so this week has been a difficult but worthwhile exercise in how to slow down and take everything in. 

Putting my design background to work I think is the only way I can break down the presentations and book reading into meaningful chunks that I learn from and look back at six months to several years later.

The above is my rough overview breaking down how Methods, Methodology and Concept feed into each other and work together. Looking back over my previous small projects that I’ve put together, there’s been plenty of Methods but not enough Methodology and Concept.

I use the method of looping on several projects. Originally this started as me creating a literal loop that I could do in the centre of York when we took headshots for work. We would give ourselves 30-45 minutes to shoot two to three people in a set loop not far from the office so that, despite being in a busy tourist city, we could have quiet roads and alleys to have some privacy and less interruption.

From this I’ve been using a fixed parameter of a roughly circular circuit when going out for photo walks. York is a circular(ish) town shaped like a dart board with two rings to it – the city walls forming the centre and the ring road being the outer edge. I’ve used this inner walls circuit to dictate where and what I can take photos of:

• Must be within reach of the walls
• No tourist shots

I’ve used another loop when working on a project that revolves around York Racecourse – in this case it’s a physical circuit of the actual publicly accessible racecourse on race days and what occurs around that.

These loops are a similar method of how writer Robert MacFarlane describes an elementary exercise in psychogeography:

“Psychogeography: a beginner’s guide. Unfold a street map of London, place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw round its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go, in whatever medium you favour: film, photograph, manuscript, tape. Catch the textural run-off of the streets; the graffiti, the branded litter, the snatches of conversation. Cut for sign. Log the data-stream. Be alert to the happenstance of metaphors, watch for visual rhythms, coincidences, analogies, family resemblances, the changing moods of the street. Complete the circle and the record ends. Walking makes for content; footage for footage.”

Taken from http://luckysoap.com/wanderkammer/MacFarlane_RdOnesOwn.html which quotes it from Robert MacFarlane, “A Road of One’s Own: Past and Present Artists of the Randomly Motivated Walk,” Times Literary Supplement, London, October 7, 2005.

This method of random restriction is also how Mark Power put together his 26 Different Endings project. Instead of a glass rim he uses the outer reaches of the London A to Z to take away some of the responsibilities of planning but this helps to focus by giving a direction.

“What the A-Z gave me was a structure: “I’ll go to the edge of each of the 56 pages which make up the periphery of the map and I’ll photograph the landscape beyond, those places unlucky enough to fall just off the edge”. This and another more practical reason: our son Milligan had just been born and I wanted to do something which at least kept me in the country. With this idea I could make a series of day trips. If the weather was right and I had a free day then I’d drive to the edge of page 57, or 148, or 12. I’d make some pictures and I’d drive home. It was as simple as that. One night I spent at a Travelodge (a cheap hotel) right on the cusp of page 10 but it was such a thoroughly depressing, never-to-be-repeated experience, it only reinforced the notion that day trips were the way to go.”

Power, M. (2014) ‘Mark Power: 26 Different Endings’, Bleek Magazine, 9th September. Available at: http://bleek-magazine.com/stories/mark-power/ 

Other artists I’m also familiar with who use this method are Quintin Lake’s The Perimeter (the coast of mainland Britain) and illustrator Oliver East (following train lines as close as possible in one direction).  

Other thoughts:

Now that I’m making headway into the course I need to look back on some things as I’m starting to get a broader understanding of subjects like Methods and Methodologies. Towards the end of last year I bought Photo Work: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice by Sasha Wolf and having slowly worked my way through this week’s topic I need to dive back into this book again in order to have a refresher and see what extra bits of methods, methodologies and concepts I can glean from it that might not have slurped into my brain the first time. 
From the same publisher there’s also The Photographer’s Playbook which has 307 assignments and ideas from different photographers which is a potential wormhole of methods to look at.