I’ve not considered how autobiographical features have shaped my connection to film and photography and my practice of these. It’s really important, I now see, and it cuts right to the heart of why my feelings about my photography on this course are declining and my feelings about my film are strengthening. 

I’ve taken photographs since I was about nine. It’s always been a very private affair. The photos I’ve taken have been for my own enjoyment, and are personal experiments; I’ve only three times been asked to take photos for others, and only once been asked to do so for money. The majority of my photos have been taken as I go along in life. They’re generally not part of the things I’m doing, the people I’m with. They’re a conversation with myself, a puzzle to solve through aesthetics – and the creating of an aesthetic or affective object is, for me, the goal. They’re like the glances out of a train window, the fleeting things you grasp, the things that grab your attention. They’re often an escape from the boredom of my everyday life – which is often crushingly dull, crushingly lonely, and as such they are driven by novelty and adventure. I cannot take photos when I’m bored of what I’m doing or what I’m looking at, and this is one major factor in my currently dwindling interest in photography – I’m bored of Exeter, bored of my home, bored of what I’m doing. Put me in a context where I can explore something new, and I’ll start photographing again. It’s not really a practice, and that’s why I think I’ve struggled so much with trying to turn it into one on this course. Rather, it’s a by-product of other things that are happening – unless it’s a formalised occasion to take photographs. 

I’ve been making films for just over two years. Learning how to make film and then making film has always been a very social affair. I’ve sought and received training and feedback throughout. My films are made with their eventual viewers in mind – they are a conversation with the world, not just myself. The first film I ever made was funded, the second for a PhD application, the third made with a community organisation and for an academic conference as part of a panel about a specific place, the fourth was made with another community organisation and with a range of contacts. I’m currently making films for Devon Wildlife Trust and about to make another for the Pebblebed Heaths Conservation Trust. My films, in other words, are an event, a purpose. My filmmaking IS a practice. 

I realise these things are not inherent in the medium. Photography takes place in the throes of the most intensely social activities and is largely focussed on its viewers. Filmmaking can be deeply personal, private. And that’s not to say these things are fixed: should luck strike and let me work with others using photography, it would become more social, and there have been times of filmmaking inactivity when I didn’t feel like a filmmaker at all. Recognition has a significant part to play. But this is what the activities have come to mean to me. I think nothing of setting up a camera and filming an interview with someone I’ve just met. I am overcome with awkwardness taking someone’s portrait, even if I’ve known them forever. When I photograph, I feel like I’m taking, prying. When I film, I feel like I’m giving, connecting. 

But there are other personal differences beyond how I relate to each as a social (or anti-social) activity. I’ve always photographed one image at a time. For me, each photograph is its own world, even if I’m getting shots of the same thing. I’m not thinking about how each photograph is going to work with others. It’s just this one moment, within this one frame, very spontaneous and that makes it exciting for me. But with film, I’m aware that I’m gathering material, even if I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing with it all. I’m looking for a kind of balance between elements, looking for range and diversity, continuity and structure. I’m slower, more thoughtful, more considered. This is perhaps partly technical – I can keep photographing handheld forever, but when I’m filming, the slowness of setting up a tripod (though I’m starting to work more handheld now) and further limited by the knowledge that I’ve only so much free memory (just over an hour if I’m shooting the highest quality files equates to the maximum 140G memory card). But it’s also autobiographical: from the first time I ever filmed, and on through the training I had in filming, each shot was part of a whole, not its own world. 

This reverberates on through the difficulties I’ve had studying for this MA and the astonishing ease with which I’ve taken to filmmaking. I have taught myself to become adept at making single images on the basis of affect and aesthetics. Until beginning this MA, I didn’t see that as an issue. However, I now appreciate that for the purposes of this course, and much in photography besides, images need to form a whole, a body of work, a project, and as such they need to interrelate. This interrelation needs to occur in part through the making of the work – something that doesn’t come naturally to me – else the images are disjointed, and also through the structuring of the work on a page, as a sequence, on a gallery wall, in an installation. Again, this doesn’t come naturally to me. Finally, crucially, something contextual, something critical should be communicated through the images and their sequencing, and it’s this that, as I’ve mentioned previously, I just don’t get. 

But why should filmmaking, which is so much more recent an activity, offer me a facility for criticality which in photography is elusive? I’ve not had any visual training beyond the explorations of my own looking, but until 2017, I knew nothing of editing film. I think it’s because I picked up soft skills elsewhere. When I began editing, it reminded me instantly of electronic music software – Protools, specifically. And it also reminded me to editing essays and novels. So it’s not the ability to use words alone that makes film more appealing. It’s something that’s fundamental to the two media. 

Photography and film are – at least by photographers – referred to as ‘lens-based media’. Their incredibly close technologies are undeniable, but what is the difference? It’s not movement either, as I’ve mentioned before – and as several critics argue, such as Peter Wollen in his foundational Fire and Ice essay of 1984. But there is another way of looking at photography and film as entirely different: whereas photography is largely two-dimensional (height and width, occasionally depth when virtual technologies or novel printing strategies are used) film is three-dimensional – to height and width, it adds duration. Film, as an art form, is thus sometimes described as belonging to time-based media. Although this term applies to gallery-oriented art forms, one might equally say that music or literature are time-based: however one plays or hears or reads these art forms, time is always a component of them. And it’s this deep experience of time, speed, pauses which I’ve acquired over years and years of writing fiction, poetry and music. What I’ve never really done, even domestically, is developed a deep understanding of spatial communication. So when it comes to working beyond the creation of individual images, something I’m pretty competent with, I just don’t have the soft skills on which to draw. And it’s my belief, whether or not anyone on the course has studied photography or not, there’s an unvoiced, possibly even unconscious assumption, that you will have acquired those soft skills somewhere or other. I’ve always though it’s curious that the photographs one makes equate to just 20% of the mark on this MA. I think that says an awful lot about where contemporary photography is at, where the gaps in my knowledge are, and just why I’ve found the experience so tough. 

Wollen, P. 1984. Fire and Ice. In Photographies, 4. pp.118-120.