Collecting Ideas For My Manifesto
My Manifesto
-It’s Important to learn and understand your subject in whatever form that looks like.
-Your education of the subject is vital, it will help you create an expressive response to the themes of your body of work.
-Use knowledge as a tool of expression. Your unconscious thoughts will formulate a collection of emotion, let this flow throughout your visual making.
Maintain your passion throughout your body of work. Don’t feel disheartened if something does not work. Learn what does work and build on that.
Slow your process down, take your time to set your compositions up right. Let them lead your viewer in and around the photographs. Bring them into the moment that you were in.
Always question the why when you are on location. Why are you photographing this subject and what do you want your viewer to feel.
When all the photographs have been taken sequence your narrative. Spend time considering the order and layout of the presentation. Let the visual narrative form from your research, theory and personal experience.
-Allow the viewer to feel just like you did when the viewer finder was against your eye.
Writing on type writer
Final Manifesto Layout
I have played around with a couple of different ways in which I can present my manifesto. When I was reading it over I was realising that my manifesto is not something that I really want to share. I am not making a statement about the art world, I am making a set of rules up for myself in order to succeed when making a body of work. This process is not complex, it is fairly simple. However, I feel like it is something I want to keep to myself and i’ll let the work that I create do the talking for me. I am in no position to make a statement about the photographic world so I do not feel like this is something that people need to read.
However, saying this, I want to make what I have learnt accessible to those people that really want it. That is why I have decided to write it in an almost coded way. You read the manifesto from right to left, up and down. It is not too hard to read as I have put break marks between the text. This isolates each word which then makes it relatively easy to read. I wrote it in this way as I want to make my reader dig deep for it. This is because the manifesto that I have written is what I think makes a strong body of work and it is the rules that I will be following when going forward with this body of work.
My Manifesto also makes a statement about manifestoes. We are artists, photographers and creators. Not philosophers, academics, politicians or activist thinkers. Yes, these themes run through our work and drive some of the best artists out there. However, what I believe is paramount is the ability to empower the viewer with those ideas through visual language and semiotics. Not with language, but with an open, subjective interpretation that comes from a photographers ability to convey a narrative through their competency as a picture maker. This is why I have made my manifesto a set of rules that I will follow in order to make work that makes comments about the Anthropocene and humanities impact on the land.