Last week I thought I’d had this project in the bag. Confident in my final choices, I took my prints to the classroom.
They looked great on screen & on my living room floor. Laying them out on the classroom table proved otherwise. After a tough few minutes, the images I chosen were mixed, matched, turned round & assessed. After a vibrant & healthy class discussion regarding criticism I was still adamant that my final decision was final.
However, over the next few days, something was gnawing away at the back of mind. I’d finished the course, settled on my final photos & added all course criteria references to my blog posts. I should be able to relax & enjoy my summer now. Why was I not able to let this go?
The next day, I chose to get the second opinion of a friend whom I trust. She has a very good eye for detail & colour. She also doesn’t pussyfoot around – if she doesn’t like something she’ll say so. Then explain why. It was also the first time she’d seen the prints, rather than just looking at the images on the screen, so she was seeing these with fresher eyes.
At first she liked the initial arrangement, then started making a few tweaks herself. Nothing major, but enough to realise that changes needed to be made. Secondly, there were other images I had printed, but not included, that she preferred. These particular images were ones which other people had picked up on & some of my personal favourites.
Time for rethink, methinks… maybe I was trying to hard with the final selection. Was I letting my aesthetic eye for patterns & matching colour get in the way. Was I being too tasteful? I remember my classmate Claire asking the question in a previous session “should I make my images more subtle?” We gave her a resounding “no”.
Right, back to the drawing board. Or should that be the living room floor… I also returned to the ethos of Surrealism itself. If the Surrealists were nonconformists then why should my final selection conform either?
Then I decided to go for a spot of automatism. Go for the five images I like best – no matching, no logic – just go for the ones that jump out. The ones I picked were those in which I kept seeing new things each time I looked at them. These were also images from which I received the best responses from others.
The result was an eclectic mix of five images, but this was quite dream-like in itself. Like the morning after when you wake from a vivid dream. You can recall certain scenes or aspects, but nothing cohesive. The you fixate on the flashbacks, focusing on the smaller details. There are sensations, emotions, revelations but still no sense of reality. As with these images, reality is just a bare boned echo recreating something else.
Then I arranged the images into a grid, moving things round until I came up with this arrangement.
Totally mad, but it seemed to work. As I’m not able to arrange an online gallery, here’s a collage of the images created using Photoshop:
Totally irrational with a cacophony of colour & curves.
Whether the images will be arranged in this way or shown individually, who knows. I’ll let whoever puts them on the college wall for the end-of-course display. Sometimes you just have to let go of that control.
My only regret is that they’re not all aluminescent prints. That would really be spectacular!
Criteria ref: 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4
Jennie Meadows 
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