It's been a while since my last blog post!

So, I've been having a think and also starting to get back into being a student. This has been two-fold, firstly I've been embarking on a project of photographing a local forest and secondly I’ve started reading again and thinking about what to write for my dissertation. But let's start with Littlestone Forest.

Recently I updated my website with a series of photographs from Littlestone Forest. This has been a project that has been going on for the last couple of months after walking around the fields nearby and exploring the forest itself. I was searching for an area to photograph and I'd been looking at landscapes, I grabbed about 10 picture books from the library all on the subject and a couple really stood out. First was The Pond by John Gossage, which impressed me because the photographs were unformuliac and really had a sense of reality. This made them accessible and gave a real sense of the place. Then there was Hidden River by John Davies who used a mixture of B&W and Colour for photographing a river that went through urban areas. The photographs were colour when the river was visible and then B&W when it was hidden. This made an impact on me and showed a creative use of mixing the two formats together.

So a mixture of these books led to the Littlestone Forest project. With this I aimed to show the difference between the forest and the surrounding fields. The fields are fairly bland and uninspiring, but are organised and regular, where as the forest is wild and chaotic. I also shot the fields in colour and the forest in B&W to highlight the difference between the two and both formats fitted the subject matter.

The next is to hopefully produce a book with the images I have taken. I plan to edit this putting the Colour and B&W images next to each other to highlight the differences between them, both in subject matter and composition.

Moving on to starting to read again for the dissertation, I've been searching for ideas. I've ben doing a bit of preliminary reading, people such as Berger and Sontag and snippets from other author’s, but I've also been reading about how to research and study, to brush up on my rusty skills!

Something that has always inspired me about photography is that anyone can literally do it; anyone can take a photograph, barring physical disability. It is a truly democratic art form. Also another aspect of photography that is important to me is photographic truth and I find its relationship with photographic ambiguity interesting.

So, it looks possible that my dissertation could be about photographic truth and its relationship with ambiguity and how this truth is influenced by mass media, advertising and public perception. Also of how accessible photography is and how this influences how truthful the image is.

But I will say the dissertation is still very much work in progress and is at the embryonic stage. But one thing I have already noticed is that with the little bit of reading I have been doing, one book kept on being mentioned, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin. I have quickly read it and I did find it very inspiring and so my next task is to read it slowly and better understand it.

So far I've gone back and read the foreword, where he asserts that creativity and genius will suffer as the artwork of the working class becomes more popular. I could write loads on just that bit itself!