Assignment 3 – Planning

I have to admit that I have found finding preparing for this assignment more onerous than the previous ones. I think it has to due with the fact that colour seems so deceptively simple, yet it is actually quite complex. My planning began with obtaining a good foundation in the subject of colour and to this end I read Johannes Itten’s The Elements of Color. This book is based on his book The Art of Color which was used in the Bauhaus as a reference text. The book has many exercises that build on understanding colour. I tried to do as many of the exercises as possible, but owing to the fact that the book is really geared towards artists, ie painters, there were a few exercises that I had to skip as I was not about to run out and purchase painting materials.

The next step was to research photographers who make exceptional use of colour and I chose to research Steve McCurry, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston and Fred Herzog.

I created a mind map to play with some ideas that I might work with:

Assignment 3 – Mind map – first draft

I had initially intended to see if I could ‘recreate’ some of Fred Herzog’s scenarios by going to the same locations and photographing the area as it is now. I had managed to find quite a few of the locations of his photographs and thought this would be a very interesting exercise.

However, the typical Vancouver weather set in and torrential downpours began making it impossible to photograph anything without risking my equipment. Some of the areas Herzog photographed are a little inaccessible in the fact that they are not car friendly – there is zero parking space in the streets these days (there was ample space when he roamed these streets). In between showers I managed to shoot in some areas nearer to home, but it was a little all over the place. I looked at fellow students’ assignments and didn’t see much of a theme for assignment 3 in many of the blogs I looked at. I then began to wonder if a theme was necessary.

So I posed the question on the OCA forum and I got this reply from Clive [1]:

It’s good practice for future courses to make connected bodies of work. As in Assignment 2 which investigates the compositional scaffolding that supports and enhances meaning in an image, colour relationships are another means of strengthening and supporting meaning in an image. Unless working in purely abstract terms the colour relationships should be subordinate to the meaning of the image but should enhance it.

Something to avoid is making images that have no other intent than to demonstrate a specific colour relationship and be reduced to ‘this is a blue flower with a yellow flower’, ‘this is a red flower with green leaves’. Working to a theme, say documenting your local shopping area, helps avoid this and gives purpose to the functioning of colour relationships in the course of making images with narratives that are essentially independent of their formal qualities.

OK – so a theme was preferable. My planning was now totally out of the window and shot to pieces by the rain. I continued on with research and while researching Eggleston, became aware of how he made his series “Democratic Forest” and I decided to switch my theme to something similar by creating a series along the lines of “My Democratic Vancouver”.

Here is my amended mind map for assignment 3:

Assignment 3 – Mind map – second draft

The plan may change slightly, but this is more doable given the crazy weather we are experiencing right now.

Reference List

[1] CliveW, 2014. ‘TAOP Assignment 3’. [28 October 2014] OCA Forum: Photography, Film & Digital Media [online]. Available from: http://www.oca-student.com/content/taop-assignment-3-0 [2 November, 2014]