Group meeting

Yesterday, Friday 25th March, Fay, Stephanie and myself met up to discuss the ideas that we had thought about since the last seminar and our initial conversations.

These are the notes that I took:

• the idea of robotics - movement, generated/breaking free from the grind and the stereotypical education system.
• letters of EDUCATION - for example, photographing E for Exams, D for Detention, U for Uniform, etc.
• amongst some others that we briefly discussed and mainly dismissed as a group
  

Both of the above ideas came from Fay and they can be seen on her blog.

The idea of robotics (which we are thinking of taking forward) is depicting the typical student who is sent through education, standardised from their starting year until the final year, almost put through a running machine, the treadmill of projects, exams, grades, reports, holidays and then the next year, the process starts all over again... we could take a dimension of this and show a person trying to break free from the process, or the idea that as people get older they lose their creativity, or the construction of educaation as a whole, the school day, the school term/university semesters, brief - project - submission - feedback - grades - brief - project...and so on.

These dimensions of the robotic idea have come from the video below, "Changing Education Paradigms" and persona experiences of education. From this Fay has found a contemporary shoot in Dazed and Confused, photographed by Mark Pillai - all of this is on Fay's blog. The styling is very constructed but also quite minimalist and block colours, in skin tight materials as well as transparent plastics and polished metals. In terms of photography, it has a similar style to Nick Knight's work, the images are shot in the studio, using both white and black backgrounds alternatively, with strong lighting and polished post production work.

Another idea for this theme (thinking about the submission of 8 images/editorial pages) is to have a 'spectrum effect' e.g. starting off with colours/explosion/lots of creativity (young child)/no inhibitions, shown by lots of layers, then moving to teenage years where there is still creativity but not as much, peer pressure/trying to be different and stand out from the crowd but in the structured education system and moving to and finishing with the modern adult in a structured job, 9am-5pm, possibly after a degree or finishing their path of education, lack of creativity, run of the mill, the treadmill of daily life, maybe commuting/'the rat race', may be bored with their job position or current life position which could be portrayed with a dull, flat aesthetic...just all ideas.

I am going to find some inspiration from this idea and look at contemporary fashoin photographers who have depicted this sort of idea or aesthetic.