Untitled Thought- Seeking Silence was the project that I submitted for my first half of second year. Since shooting this project, I have had time to reflect on the unconscious reasons for why I made the work. When I am immersed in a body of work, I sometimes find it hard to explain why I am making the photographs when I am releasing the shutter button. I have now had the time I need to think about the reasons for why I made the work and for what reasons are going to stay with me when I begin to create this new body of work.
Untitled Thought- Seeking Silence was a visual response to how I was feeling at the beginning of the year. I was struggling with a number of things, especially with the amount of time that I was having to spend inside due to the pandemic. A body of work began to form from the long walks that I was taking in order to have some breathing space from the real world. A time in my week where I would go and actively seek silence in the landscape, a space in my head which became instantly content and calm with the madness of the world that is built around me. I directly documented the spaces that I was in, capturing the photographs in a traditional landscape manner both on film and with digital. This process enabled me to show the viewer the spaces in which I was exploring to find silence within myself and within the physical world.
This body of work found itself being outputted in two ways. The moving image that is above and also in a book which I am currently selling on my website. I made the moving image so that the viewer could see me in the landscape and connect the photographs with my personal journey. Placing myself in the body of work separates me from the landscape photographs, I believe that it also shows the viewer that I was actively trying to seek the silence myself and it was not just a journey that I was taking my viewer on. I would have liked to have developed the moving image part of this body of work further but unfortunately I did not have the time. Thus I would like to explore the way in which I can use photography and videography together when producing a body of work.
I think that there was something missing from the project, and that was the reason for why I was producing the work. I did not make it clear why I was going out, exploring and feeling the need to find silence. In this new body of work, I want to explore the reason why. I want to work out my identity as a photographer has developed in the way in which it has. I think that over the past 6 years I have been on a journey of photographic and personal development. Understanding my practice and pinning down the reason why I do what I do will help me go forward with future projects and the final year of my degree.