Portfolio Review Analysis and Feedback

Professional Feedback and Discussion with Max Ferguson during Falmouth Flexible Photo's Symposium week, March 2021.

Showing my work to students and outside professionals, or anyone I have not met is quite a daunting thing for me and something I am not used to doing. I suppose the closest I come is sharing my work on Instagram, but there my voice is silent, and I am not seeing or speaking directly to them. The portfolio review as part of Falmouth Flexible Photo’s Symposium week has given me a chance to challenge this and discuss my work with those who know nothing about it.

I signed up to a session with Max Ferguson after viewing his website. I was intrigued by the softness of his images of nature and the short texts accompanying ‘Whistling for Owls’, and as I am unsure still as to how I could disseminate my work, with current ideas as a book, zine or printed, I hope to get a curators perspective on my work.

I found the session really enjoyable, extremely helpful and positive. Max gave me some feedback on the edit of my edit of my portfolio and after seeing images I had added in the ‘Possible Choices’ section at the end, he could see that the first choices were the right ones to show and the edit really worked, almost as a journey of my observations. My choice of starting image he felt was strong and left him wondering what it was at the beginning, with a suggestion that it could have been about space, almost abstract, and as I discussed and showed more images, he could see the intent coming through.

I took some time during the week placing images on the floor and slowly sticking them to a piece of cardboard to help my editing process, so to have feedback saying it worked was encouraging to here and it is a method I will continue to use to help with editing choices.

I discussed my use of both my DSLR camera and Smartphone and how I use editing apps on some images, Max found this interesting and felt that those choices worked as you could not tell which were taken on a camera or on a phone, something I have been unsure of using much in my project due to ratio differences and low image quality that can be associated with phone photography.

A suggested that was made by Max was the use of text within my work. His suggestion came after hearing my talk about the intent and meaning behind it and how well that came across and that some short text in some format could be an addition to this project, this is definitely something I will look in to, as I don’t what the metaphorical element of human fragility and my own to be too obvious, but to allow the audience to make their own mid up and have their own feelings about the work, something which Max also mentioned as being there as well in the development of my work.

I have been given a few practitioners to look at following this session; Hannah Fletcher and her Sustainable Darkroom as an idea of how I could develop or even print these images in the future, linking the natural world to photography, an exhibition that was held at the V&A which displayed a series about the representation of trees within photography and finally, Odette England a photographer who has explored photographs being left to decay in the ground over time.

Below are the final edit choices I made to show in my portfolio, they can also be viewed in my Work in Progress galleries on this site. The work was shown as a PDF during the session.

Final:

Possible Choices:

In summary, I found the whole experience enjoyable and insightful, seeing other students from different stages in their studies and Max’s feedback to everyone individually was so helpful and encouraging for me to be able to see my project being understood and enjoyed from a perspective of freshness by someone else.

Suggested work to look at:

England, Odette. “Odette England || Artist || Photographer.” Odette England, 2021, www.odetteengland.com/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.

Fletcher, Hannah. “H a N N a H – F L E T c H E R.” Hannah-Fletcher, 2021, www.hannahfletcher.com/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.

Victoria and Albert Museum. “V&a · into the Woods: Trees in Photography.” Victoria and Albert Museum, 2021, www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/into-the-woods. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.

Reference:

Ferguson, Max. “Max Ferguson.” Max Ferguson, 2021, www.max-ferguson.co.uk/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.