Last week I had a tutorial with my tutor, mainly to talk about the feedback I had received earlier and also the essay.

The main points we covered were also bought up about the Peter Kennard exhibition that I had seen the day before. Comparing my own work with Kennards, mine is too complicated and is trying to say too much. There is a lack of clarity which Kennard produces through keeping his imagery simple and to the point.

This is what I need to do with my own work, I need to restrict myself to using two or three images to create a simpler and more direct message. In the example below there is six images and it is all too busy, too much going on and is not clear what it is trying to say. My thinking was to depict what I thought would be the worst thing a child could play with, which is guns and drugs, but this is not clear in the image. It was suggested that the image would be more effective if it was only the main photograph used with just the image of the gun being held by the child. So I have tried it and the results are below.

Out of the two images I like the colour better. By having the gun in the child’s hand and both being colour has a touch of subtlety which, when noticed, does produce more of a shock. It seems that there is a bigger gap between the scene and the gun, which in B&W is missed and the gritty nature of B&W undermines the shock value.

I can now see how by simplifying my approach the images do become stronger and more direct. By having them less convoluted and simpler, this has improved them more than what I thought it would.

Another point we discussed was the reversal of the writing. Once the idea was explained, having the writing reversed makes it semi gibberish and harder to understand, my tutor liked the idea. He also like having the the font of the word conservative being different colours to emphasise the “con in conservatives”.

So, my next steps are to research Alexander Rodchenko and the works he produced. I also need to decide on how I am going to express the theme of striving for Utopia. With this in mind I have come across a free copy of the original book from the 16th century available on the kindle, which I have downloaded and started to read. Hopefully this will lead to a clearer idea of how to express this ambition of the conservative manifesto.

The last point to mention was the discussion about producing the essay. I think I have already decided to write a 2,500 word essay and split the makes 50/50 for the module. The theme of the essay is for myself to decide, originally it was going to be about the relationship between text and image, but as my tutor pointed out this covers a wide area and needs to be as bit more specific. I might write about the history of the collage and the montage, which I would find interesting and will tie in nicely with my research. But I think the only thing I have decided so far is to write a 2,500 word essay.