Search

38) Guest Speakers, Sophie Sherwood & Dafna Talmor - 29/11/17

Alice Lock
Nov 30, 2017
2 min read

This Wednesday we had two guest speakers come in to talk to us, the first being Sophie Sherwood, an MA student, and the second was Dafna Talmor. My notes from the talk are scanned in below.

My favourite work that Sophie spoke about in the talk was her series 'Andy Roberts Archive', all about her father who has passed away. Inspired by Veronica Bailey, Sophie used old letters, notes and scraps of paper her father had collected in his life and collaged them with photographs of him. I really liked this idea and I love the mixed media of the writing and photography. I think sometimes writing with photographs explains too much for the viewer, however in this case I think it really adds meaning to the work, and makes it seem more personal towards her father. I also found it really interesting and helpful to her project that her father was a hoarder, because she had a lot more material to work with for the project. Some examples of her work can be seen below.

Dafna Talmor was next up to speak, and my favourite project out of everything she spoke about was her 'Intimacy of Strangeness' work, also following on into her 'Obstructed Views' project. I really like how she was playing with the idea of the viewer seeing what's in the frame, but also making them wonder what's beyond the frame. This idea can first be seen in her 'Intimacy of Strangeness' work, however I couldn't find any record of this online, so here are some of my favourite photos from her 'Obstructed Views' series, which present the same idea. I also really love how the whole series is self-portraits, I think it makes the work seem a lot more intimate and that she's really projecting her feelings to the viewer.

Another point she mentioned which resonated with me was how she has looked back a lot of her photos and realised they were a turning point in her project at the time. She said "Years later it all fell into place". I liked how she was talking about this because it reminded me of a Wolfgang Tillmans interview I've previously read where he said "I never underestimate the importance of the fleeting moment; potentially a good thing can happen at any time and only reveal its full relevance over the course of time". This all encourages me to be constantly shooting and not be so quick to delete things, because their meaning may grow over time.

Overall I found the talks really interesting, and it was great to hear from two people rather than just one person. They're both really talented women and it was nice to see a mix of really variated work.