I am well behind with my updates at present because of the general world chaos! However, that dories not mean that I have not been plodding on. Social isolation is difficult, not just not seeing people but actually functioning in an ordered manner.

Reading:

• Project Cleansweep – fascinating and very scary book about military use of land in Britain
• Marianne Hirsh – Family Frames, very dense book on memory and use of photo in memory work. Eventually finished it and made (very long) notes
• Also re-read the work on the Hardman Collection by Keith Roberts
• Daniel Chandlers work on the gaze – this was actually very helpful in my thinking process
• Reading latest Aperture magazine – House and home – much of which is on architecture
• Natural Light II (and some of the associated books)

Thinking and doing:

• Spent a lot of time thinking about how I can do work with the present issues of social isolation. I am pretty much house bound at present, which makes taking pictures of people other than my long-suffering family very difficult. Maybe I need to invest in a very long lens and stand on the balcony!
• I bought an old room screen that has decoupage (in a poor state) – which I am thinking about using as a backdrop for some inside images
• Idea for a new project
  • Our local park has a lot of memorial benches. Can I take images of the benches and/or the nameplates and/or the settings and somehow use them in work about collective memory?
• I attended the bi-weekly hangout for the photography course for the first time – interesting although just sat and listened today, it was useful though to be in contact with other people
• Planned to attend the zoom on assignments – but missed it – that is the issue with the lack of structure. However, have downloaded to PDF and will look at the advice in detail

Photography:

• Spent the first week of isolation trying to take regular hourly inside images, using my mobile phone and a square format
  • Where I was in the house
  • A selfie
• I found this harder to do than I expected as, even with using a timer I tended to forget to take the images, and also they tended to be very repetitive as I was mostly inside either in the living room or at my desk. However, I think this is a piece of work that could possibly be repeated, or even used as is for an example of moving/lining in a confined space
• I also spent time playing with photoshop and layered all the selfies for each day together to make a composite image – this was definitely interesting. I would not say that they make me look my best – but interesting.
• 
• Continued to take the images of DWARF that I will use for assignment 3. Good thing I did as I now cannot get them as closed for foreseeable future.
• Took a series of images of son and husband for the gaze exercise. Remarkably difficult to get family to pose and do what you are asking rather than what they think you want!