While a new course usually brings new challenges and different experiences, my time on People and Place was unique in several respects.
Anxiety I don’t do much posed photography, neither objects nor people. I was trepidatious about portraiture and procrastinated far too long. Nearly ten month passed between joining the course and finishing work on Assignment 1.
Lack of time I am presently in the last stages of finishing a Master’s degree in Buddhist Studies. I have been working on this and OCA courses in parallel since 2012, but the research requirement for the thesis turned out to more demanding than I anticipated.
Misinformation As result of spending so much time on the thesis, I had by May 2015 not completed anything on P&P aside from a few exercises for Part One. I was concerned that my course would expire and contacted OCA regarding deadlines and extensions. I was informed that my course would expire July 2015 and that I could be considered for an extension only if three assignments had been submitted by then. That left me approximately two months to complete three assignments. I mapped out a plan, informed my tutor, and finished the required work. In July I requested an extension so as to complete the last two assignments and receive credit for the course. OCA then found they had made a mistake. My course would not in fact expire until July 2016.
The problem was compounded by the tutor not understanding what was happening. Despite keeping him informed, cc’ing him in communications with OCA administration, and sending him a plan outlining how I would tackle the work in such a short time, he did not understand until July that I was rushing my assignments because I was working under the assumption that I had to complete all this work by July. The tutor remarks on this situation in Tutor Report to Assignment Three.
Should you require additional documentation regarding this incident, I can forward copies of email. You may also seek verification with the tutor, Mr Matt White, or with OCA Head of Operations, Ms Dee Whitmore.
Working to deadline It was entirely fitting that the Assignment Five brief emphasized the professional aspect of photographic practice, one in which the luxury of revisiting subjects and reworking images is often unavailable. While I was somewhat upset to learn that I had been misinformed about the course deadline, it was not an altogether unfortunate development as it forced me to plan and execute ideas quickly. I don’t know that I will ever be a professional photographer. That is certainly not my ambition. But from my experience in other fields of work, I know the value of efficiency and am therefore grateful for the opportunity presented to me this year as a result of a mistake.
Concept A recurring theme in tutor comments was the need to develop conceptual approaches to assignments. I have discussed this at length in my Reflections to tutor reports, as well as in Assignment submissions, so will here only briefly recap. While I appreciate the tutor’s interest in my development and understand the value of conceptual approaches to art, I see such approaches growing organically out of the process of work. They cannot be imposed, but only nurtured. Like plants, they will grow only when the minimal conditions have been established. That didn’t seem to happen for me on this course, perhaps because I was often working to deadline. Given the tutor’s repeated entreaties, I revised my submission for Assignment 4 to incorporate a conceptual approach, but this is as far as the conceptual is evidenced in my assessment submissions. As I have made clear elsewhere, the course material for P&P does not discuss the development of conceptual approaches, and nothing about them is noted in the assignment briefs. I therefore feel confident of submitting for assessment with evidence of only one such example.
#
No comments:
Post a Comment