Assignment 4 - Tutor Review

Overall Comments from tutor's report on assignment 4 first attempt.

Just a couple of thoughts:

You are entitled to a tutorial after you have prepared your work for assessment and prior to sending it off in order to dot the Is and cross the Ts.  Assuming that you are aiming for the March assessment this should be around the end of January and might be best as a Skype video call is you are set up for it.  Let me know what you think so we can set something up.

Because I tend to annotate the written work you send me you will need to include copies of these with your submission.  

Remember that you should rework anything you are moved to in response to tutorial input, this can mean trying something different if you are moved to as well as just re-working an image or two...or not as you see fit of course.  I am sure that you are aware that the assessors like to see and give credit for students responding to the tutorial comments and I really don’t mean a slavish acceptance of everything said but, and I would expect you to do this but I need to say it, a thoughtful reaction, positive or negative.

Assignment potential (after Assignments 2 and 4)

Given that you have done the last two assignments in reverse order this is somewhat redundant.

Feedback on assignment

I do have some problems with this critical review.

The premise of writing about “Emancipation of Women in the 20^th Century with special regard to women photographers” is by no means a bad one.  However, you have the balance all wrong really.  As part of a photography degree programme you really need to be fore fronting the photography element rather than the emancipation element.

You have picked a good cross section of women photographers, each of which has, either on their work or in the story of their struggle for recognition or both, a relevant story to tell.  They would easily illustrate the struggle for emancipation but I fear that you do little more than list them.  Lee Millar could, on her own exemplify the problem you are discussing but you don’t mention her start as a model, her work both as model/muse and assistant (not to mention lover) with Man Ray, her position in the Surrealist circle in the 30s, hers work for Conde Nast and others as a war photographer particularly from Belsen and Dachau, and her near disappearance from the histories till her son started to archive, show and publish her work.  That alone with examples of her work and some analysis and paralleling to the women’s movement over the 20^th C could be the essay itself.  But I think it would be even better if you were to say some more about the photographers you list in relation to the times in which they lived, use Millar as the main example and round off with a discussion of the work of Sherman and Horn in terms of identity, Godwin and Rosler in terms of environmental and political imagery and perhaps Leibovitz as that apparently rare creature, the female in the world of Bailey, Snowdon, Litchfield and the like.

There is still time for you to do this and let me cast my eye over it before you have to send work off for assessment and I highly recommend that you do it.

Learning Logs

Your blog seems to have stalled before Christmas.  I think that you need to try to fill the gap since then, you must have done something that you could/should log in the last few months!

Suggested reading/viewing

If you haven’t yet read Barthes’ Camera Lucida, then after you have sent off your work for assessment would be a good time to make the attempt.  You might also like to have a look at The Cruel Radiance by Suzie Linfield and Fred Richen’s After Photography

Barthes, R., 1993. Camera Lucida: Refections on Photography. London: Vintage Classics.

Linfield, S., 2010. The Cruel Radience: Photography and Political Violence. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Ritchin, F., 2009. After Photography. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.