4) Obsessions and Curiosities with Amanda Harman - 4/10/17

In Wednesday's lecture with Amanda we explored her different 'obsessions', going through some of her favourite past and present work. My notes are scanned in below.

One of the first things she mentioned that stuck with me is that as a freelance photographer, you must be disciplined and make time for your own work amongst all the commissioned work. Amanda said she combatted this by allocating one 'creative day' a week in between all her paid jobs. It's not really something I've thought about before, but I can imagine it's very easy to get engrossed with the commissioned work and forget all about personal projects - which in reality is why you're doing paid work, to fund your own briefs.

A project which I really liked that Amanda showed was her 'Child's Play' series, in which she took photos of young children doing what makes them happy - playing!

I find this project quite interesting because it shows a time when children did still play outside and were quite easily pleased without masses of toys and technology. It was also a time when people weren't as suspicious of individuals with a camera, making it a lot easier to capture these shots in a natural, fun way. I also feel the series is quite inspiring in terms of my own project idea (happiness, what makes people happy), because it's documenting what make children of this age and time happy - something that I want to do in my own work through different ways of shooting.

A question she brought up that stuck with me after the lecture was "If you couldn't fail, what would you do?" - changing your mindset to realise that all the things that you want to do that you think are impossible are possible if you put your mind to it, which I think is a nice and also ambitious mindset that I want to have.

After showing us some of her more recent work, I felt that my style of taking photographs is quite similar to Amanda. For instance I really like her Clubhouse series (see below for images) because her images look so clean and honest and I'm really engaged by the balanced and well thought out compositions. These images work really well with the excerpts of interviews from people, combining the text and visual to illustrate what places mean to people.

She closed the lecture with a quote from Chuck Close that really inspired me:

The line that stuck out most to me was "All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself", because it tells me that the best way to get ideas for this Curiosities and Obsessions brief is to just get stuck in and start researching and shooting - so that's what I'm going to do!

Overall I really liked this lecture as it was great to see some of Amanda's own work and the things she's learnt along the way from her degree to being out in the real world.

#obsessions