Work to Date

1. Work to Date iPhoneography- • Is it an effective means of photographic exploration? • Is it possible to build an engaging body of work using mobile photography? • Interviewed Stephen Mayes and Kathy Ryan in New York • Published daily work of my travels through the urban landscapes of New York and Boston.

6. Conclusions • Agreed with Stephen and Kathy’s views on the freedom of publishing your own work (which I did on WordPress, Flickr, Behance and 4ormat). • However, their point about audiences following photographers’ stories as well as their work whilst true, is a lot more difficult in practice. I call it “The Instagram Problem”. • There is so much imagery and work out there on-line that finding an audience to really “look” at your work is a huge task. • Furthermore, the narcissistic nature of Instagram, Facebook, EyeEm etc. means a lot of the time your followers are in a “follow me and I’ll follow you” exchange in an effort to increase their numbers of followers without ever really looking at your work. • Because of this I have decided to take a step back and focus on a more personal project through which I will incorporate iPhoneography in some way as well as more traditional methods.

8. “Finding Home” • This project seeks to re-visit the houses which I grew up in, to find a connection to a place called ‘home’, and to discover what ‘home’ means to me as it’s something I don’t have any real sense of. • Will I find a place that I call ‘home’? • Will home be connected to a building in any way or does ‘home’ reside in the relationships/community we build? Is it the sanctuary we build inside a house that’s more important (possessions, décor, activities) more than the building/street/community or the time spent in one place? • Is home the country I come from, Scotland?

9. 9 Houses in 14 Years

12. What is home?

18. Areas to explore: • The buildings/streets • The interior/architecture • The surrounding area/shops/parks • Literature I read at the time (CS Lewis, Tolkien) • My Grandmother’s address book

23. “There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.” J.R.R.Tolkien “The Hobbit”

24. “For the house furnishes us dispersed images and a body of images at the same time… transcending our memories of all the houses in which we have found shelter, above and beyond all the houses we have dreamed we lived in, can we isolate an intimate, concrete essence?” Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space