Looking Ahead

I have Assignment 4 in draft completed. Need to leave it alone for a short time before giving it it's final polish.

Now thinking about the final assignment. The subject of Assignment 4 was Robert Adams so I am committed to producing images in his style. Fortunately it is not too difficult to decide what his style is about being a look at the depredation of the American West through the presence of man. His style is to use a very limited range of tones in his black and white photographs, he eschewed colour photography, and almost without exception his skies would be considered to be 'blown out' in present day thinking.

He also has a distinctive approach to the 'cropping' of images cutting off the edges or roofs of buildings.   He does not include human beings in his images very often and those that he does often are facing away from us.

One of his pet hates is the 'tacky' housing so typical of the American West across the vast tracts of what was once wilderness. Almost invariable clapboard we have very few examples of the same thing in this Country. However there is a similar 'blot' on the landscape - the mobile homes, the residential caravan and park homes. It is these that I will look to for some of the images. I would assume that the nearest equivalent we have to wilderness and prairies is the moorlands in Scotland and the South West of England. Another alternative could be the sand dunes that are around our coasts that in some cases offer a very similar landscape.

I feel that I will have to develop a series of 'plans' as I find examples of what I am looking for in my journeys around the Country.