Bringing it all together… Summary assessment of my major project

[Image: Me on a chicken farm on the Crimea, Ukraine, December 2005. Thought it was a fitting photograph for a dissecting blog entry…]

I have decided to submit this blog as my critical assessment report, which is required as part of my submission for earning a master degree in photojournalism and documentary photography at LCC. In a few days’ time I will submit my major project in form of a multimedia slideshow as the final part.

In my opinion, nothing comes closer to a critical assessment of my major project than my almost day-to-day account of my progress with the project (and my studies in general) in form of this blog. What is more, the blog entries were written in ‘real time’ while I was working on my project and therefore are, in my opinion, more valuable to analyse my thought processes and my approach to the project than any ex post dissection could be. And in a sense, this blog also reflects – in an unvarnished fashion - my successes, excitement, frustrations and failures along the way without the benefit of hindsight.

This is an attempt at summarizing and bringing it all together.

I have written on the choice and rationale of the project here and here, the approach and theoretical background here, visual style and role models here, and here, and here, and in various instances on the process here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.

How successful have I been in my project and approach? Magnum photographer David Hurn says in “On Being a Photographer”: “…I never claim that my photographs reveal some definitive truth. I claim that this is what I saw and felt about the subject at the time of the pictures were made. That’s all that any photographer can claim. I do not know any great photographer who would presume otherwise.” (p.42, On Being a Photographer by Bill Jay and David Hurn, LensWork Publishing, 2004).)

In a similar vein, I believe that I have documented life in these underpasses as I saw it. There are many aspects I could have focused on but left out by choice. What is more, as the project progressed, it gained more focus and, in a sense, my choices of what I did eventually photograph became narrower and narrower… A view that is often echoed by photographers undertaking long-term projects.

In particular, I did not dwell too much on the change to the underpasses environment that was conspicuously happening while I was photographing my project. I did notice it and reported and mused extensively in this blog about it. However, I did not want to make it the main focus of my project. That would have been a different project altogether.

Have there been failures and misses in this project? For sure there have been a few. I wrote about my frustrations that the door to the traders’ recreational/common rooms remained closed, despite various attempts on my side to get access. And of course there are some portraits of people I would have liked to take and whose portraits - in my opinion - would have added to the story. But for one reason or another, some people refused to be photographed. And it goes without saying that I respected that. There is the fortune teller with a glass eye who used to sit in the underpasses next to his signpost with arcane and mysterious scribbles on it waiting for customers (can you think of a visually more appealing image? No fashion photographer could have staged better what lay naturally right in front of my lens), there is the sad man who sells glue and did not want to be photographed because he considers himself a failure compared to his father who fought in the war, and there is the umbrella seller who also refused to be photographed, made unmistakably clear by her furious look in her face…And I am sure there are others who I wished I could have included in the project…

I also wish I could have spent a few more evenings with the elderly people who used to dance to accordion music at Teatralna in order to gather more material on them and simply because it was fun to watch the joy for life that emanated from these people’s faces.

And lastly, there are a few shots that I simply missed because I was not fast enough or I had chosen an angle that did not work or I just stood in the wrong place. But maybe that is ingrained in every street photography project and is simply inevitable …which is not to say that a better photographer could not have gotten these shots.

But overall I think that I have been very successful in my underpasses project… I feel I have created an atmospheric piece that draws viewers into these underpasses and which also let’s viewers spend a few virtual minutes with the various groups that inhabit that space. I also think the combination of the images with the sound from these underpasses is quite powerful (I have written before on my decision process to create a multimedia piece instead of, for example, a book).

During a recent workshop at Magnum, which I attended, Mark Power presented images from his ongoing project on Poland and the Polish. He mentioned that he does not claim to able to capture the soul and essence of the Polish culture and society any better than maybe a Polish photographer who was born and raised in Poland could do. He admitted that his perspective would inevitably remain the perspective of a foreigner peeking into a country and people with a long and colourful history that he did not share. He did claim, however, that his perspective could be an interesting outsider’s perspective, a perspective from an outsider who is oblivious to the confusing and often distracting details that someone ‘local’ might be burdened with and which essentially would impair this local’s uncluttered view on his/her own country and people.

By analogy, I do not claim that my perspective on the underpasses is necessarily the ‘right’ or only one that represents some form of approximation to what might describe the social fabric in these underpasses. Like Power in Poland, I will inevitably remain a foreigner to the Ukraine and cannot even start to claim that I have grasped the rich and diverse Ukrainian culture. However, I nevertheless hope that my project gives viewers an interesting insight into what I think is a fascinating and rich social micrososm.