Still struggling with working in the lockdown! Slightly more organised but stopped doing the highly rigid photography sessions as an found that it was making me even more stressed and was not productive. Just doing and no thought doesn’t work for me. Having said that – I have an interesting batch of images from lockdown that I may be able to use at some point.

Reading and watching:

• Read the MoMA book on their exhibition of Lange – fascinating to see her old work in its context as they show much of it in the original journals or books. A very different view from just seeing it as single prints displayed as art works.
• Finished reading Will Gompertz – What Are You Looking At? It has given me a much greater understanding of what modern art is, what the various terms mean and the historical context. Some I now like, others I am still bemused by.
• Reading biography of Lange, A Life Beyond Limits. It’s clear that like most (all) driven people she was certainly not flawless- but the flaws are part of her humanity and that is what makes her images compelling.
• Ongoing reading of The Photographer’s Eye.
• Attended research zoom with Andrea Norrington – really useful
• Attended zoom on assessment with Dan Robinson – still confused
• Attended session with library on referencing -kept losing contact so will look when its posted.
• Attended zoom with Arpita Shar Politics of Portraiture – absolutely fascinating and I learnt a lot. Now need to follow up on all the links
• Watched a zoom on Ashley Gilbertson on Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot – interesting talk about how things were for him in Iraq and how that translated into to images, often of very small snapshots of peoples lives
• Listening to Siri Husvedt A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women –series of essays about modern art, feminism, and her view of the world. I am experimenting with listening to them rather than reading and am finding that the slower pace actually makes things sink in better.

Thinking and doing:

• I set up the first meeting of a group for the people doing IAP now. This was interesting as everybody talked about where there were and how they got onto the course in the first place. Hopefully, we can keep the momentum up.
• Set up a Padlet for the information from the IAP group
• Set up a personal Padlet to use to correlate my research
• On the back of Andrea’s zoom have changed to using Zotero for my reference system and am in the process of going back over all my previous posts for IAP to make sure the referencing is UCA Harvard correct (I hadn’t realised that it was different from standard Harvard)
• Tried out using Paperpile for referencing – but it doesn’t work well with Word
• Working on A4:
  • Done most of the exercises
  • Thinking about assignment, collecting words about my Mother to use as a base

Photography:

• Not managed to do much as struggling to not just take pictures for no reason
• Continuing with calotypes
  • Using a remade paper but thinking about buying the chemical and making my own
• Using Helios lens with some lovely effects (when it works)