Self Evaluation Report

Self Evaluation Report – Laura Parkinson

International Markets and Contexts

For this module, I had to work in a team to create a photographic festival that could take place anywhere in the world. We decided to collaborate our interests of portraiture and create the festival “Realms of the Unknown”, which took our love of photographing people surreal things together.

I used Maurice Heesen as my research, as I wanted to photograph something I had never photographed before. Heesen took blood and gore to create a series of images that looked on the lighter side of death; how we should die smiling. His images inspired me to take the theme of blood and death, and create some editorial inspired images that had a twist. Looking back over my research, I did a lot of extensive research into other photographers who had looked at blood and gore, although I wish I had looked at more fashion magazines such as Vogue to find examples within print.

I then took to the studio to create some high fashion portraits with fake cuts filled with blood. I think my images look really professional, and the editing that I did made them not look as fake. I have learn a lot technically from this shoot, as I had never shot on a white background before, so had to change the lighting to stop shadows forming behind the model and making the background pure white. Some of the background on my images did turn grey because of lack of light from the left hand side, however, I have learnt from my mistakes and next time will know I need three lights rather than two.

Our presentation went well and a lot of effort was put into the logo and layout of it. We spoke about how we planned to lay out our exhibition within Grizedale forest, as well as how we were influenced for our work and our own work, which we had produced. It was also inspiring to see other people’s plans and how they had conducted the module. It made us realise, to some extent, that we had not done enough in terms of contacting people about pricing and seeing the location. If I were to do this module again, I would plan a field trip with my group to Grizedale forest, where we could have made a precise plan of where our images would hang from and how we could incorporate our work with the sculptures that are already there. Overall, I think we were really creative with planning our exhibition in comparison to other groups. We planned to have actors and dancers to make the overall feel of the festival more exciting, and also thought about the smaller details when creating the invoice estimate, such as candles and wire to hang the images.