the igniting failure

Second term of 1st year at University: we were tasked with shooting a story around Plymouth in 24 hours. From seeking out, to uploading via FTP to our network, it all had to be done in a day.

 

At the time I was looking into myths around Cornwall, so I made a project surrounding the local myth lingering in Plymouth that there's an underground tunnel connecting Drake's Island to the Hoe front. A week's worth of solid research went into this, scrounging on old defunct blogs for any leads to evidence that this may be true, some of which produced more theories on tunnels that lead to other places dotted around the city. I went in confident with the cushion of research I had done, but at the first location I realised my technical skills just wouldn't let me get across what I wanted to say.

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Until you start to become comfortable with how you work, which really comes with experience and learning through epic and often embarrassing failures, your work is heavily inspired by the established practitioners that you look up to. As I have reluctantly realised, you will never get close to replicating their look. The start of university saw me try and replicate the work of Spencer Murphy, especially his lighting methods. I particularly favoured the series he did on Jockeys, and thought the ambient light mixed with flash was the only was to take a portrait. I quickly abandoned the idea when I couldn't achieve the same aesthetic. 

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Analogue film has been resurfacing for a few years, and now it's back in full form with big fashion houses like Gucci using photographers that work using it, favouring its nostalgic qualities. There is an argument that film can't be replicated using digital, regardless of filters, but that's exactly what I tried to do for this project. I wanted to allude to something, to the nostalgia of a time when this alleged tunnel would have been functional, when these defunct blogs would have been in full swing and raging with sceptics and conspirers. Now it's calm. The theories have become dormant and the theorists, silent. Probably because there has never been any proof, or because there is always a time limit on the buzz around a suspicion before the world moves onto something else. 

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I wanted my images to feed off this silence, and emit calm - instead they seem bland and dingy. I feel this is partly due to not having the skills in first year to actually make this happen, and partly due to the research having just been on the story with little regard to how I would actually visualise it.

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