This is a summary post for assessment; the full A5 posts are available here.
The Looking Glass: A meditation on past and present, the real and the imagined, the physical and the spiritual, this image investigates the tangible and unavoidable sense of history and prior occupation that infuses the Kemptown flat in which I’ve lived for the past two years.
The house I live in was built in the 1850s and is situated in Kemptown, an area of Brighton created to provide seaside homes for wealthy Londoners. During the 20th century all but a few of these once-grand houses were divided into flats and bedsits, and most became neglected and run-down. Meanwhile Kemptown acquired a new identity as Brighton’s foremost gay and alternative area. This image aims to capture the history of the area in general and the spirit of my flat in particular, whose past inhabitants have left their traces in many ways, both visible and invisible.
I searched in vain for a genuine photograph of the family who built the house and lived in it for two generations, so decided to represent them with one of another family from around the same period. I wanted to include residents from a selection of periods, and found a suitable family portrait from around the 1920s, but the 1960s was more challenging as it became apparent that by then nobody went to studios for family photos, so I used a photo of my own family from that time. I also wanted to include at least one person from the period since the house was divided into 10 flats in the 1980s, and I know that a dancer lived in this flat for a while, so found an image to represent him too. I overlaid all the images in Photoshop, using various blending settings to allow each image to be seen without blocking the others and to evoke the analogue methods of portraying ghosts, fairies and ectoplasm used in Victorian times, when interest in the supernatural was at a peak of popularity and séances were very likely held in Kemptown rooms like mine.
I had carried out several experiments with printing onto semi-translucent fabric for assignment 3, and felt this could offer a way to bring the presence of these past inhabitants into my flat. My initial idea was to print the composite image at life size, then photograph it as part of a scene which also included me. I also thought of projecting the image onto a semi-translucent screen, and discovered that this technique is in common use as a Halloween trick, but came to the conclusion that it required a much larger space than mine to achieve a life-size effect that I could also interact with.
To get an idea of what the image might look like as a backdrop to a scene in which I also appeared, I mocked that up in Photoshop, which led me to conclude that including myself as one of the layers of the composite image would actually be a better solution, emphasising my status as just one more of the cycle of inhabitants. Although the image I used of myself in this mock-up was intended only as a placeholder for a more considered one, perhaps one in which I would face the camera and thus take my place amongst the other residents, I decided that there were things I liked about it, not least the way the three-dimensionality of my slippers’ placement on the carpet seems to suggest that I’m standing at the entrance to a time portal. Feeling it was time to ask for peer critique, I tabled the work for discussion at the next fortnightly forum hangout, where I received some thought-provoking feedback, including that there is too much going on in the image, that it is too complex and that there’s no hook to engage the viewer. I gave these points a lot of thought over the following two days, wondering whether I should rethink the project entirely, but decided to press on and submit it to my tutor.
While awaiting his feedback I found myself drawn to the image I made for exercise 3.2.2. I thought about what the 11-year-old me represented in that picture and the me of today might want to tell each other, and found that adding just a few elements to the image significantly shifted its narrative to include personal insights that I would struggle to articulate verbally. Feeling that it might be a better response for assignment 5 than my original submission, I tabled it for discussion at the next forum hangout, where I received divergent views, with a majority preferring the new image to varying degrees and two preferring the original one. Reasons given in support of the new image included its openness and scope for interpretation, while reasons for preferring the original included its greater complexity and scope for investigation. Deciding to keep all options open until I had received tutor feedback, I also considered submitting both images together and made an amended version of the original image with the same wider aspect ratio as the new one.
My tutor’s feedback and our subsequent online discussion included considering the more derivative nature of the new image and the possibility of the pair conflicting with one another. Having also concluded that the original image was closer to my heart, I decided to keep that one – but with its new wider aspect ratio, which gave a greater sense of space and three-dimensionality. Due to time and financial constraints I decided to submit the image as an A3 print, but have not abandoned the fabric print idea and may return to it in future, alongside further consideration of the potential for projecting the image onto fabric, perhaps as a gallery installation in which the viewer would face a life-sized projection, either on a single screen or on multiple layered screens, each screen containing a single layer of the image.