CRJ The next next week
Falmouth University MA Photography
Module 2: Sustainable Strategies PHO730
19/06/2023
Topic 2 and 3:
19/06/2023
So here I am, lost in the wilderness of sustainable strategies and I think I may be inadvertently stumbling into something here. As part of my work I develop Digital Stories for my NHS Trust, a part of this has led me to begin contact with the Centre For Public Impact - who, through digital media, try to change public opinion. I am filled with hope, joy and anticipation. Their initial email came at just the right time. Though I still don’t fully feel that I know what I am doing, perhaps the fog is lifting.
In the last two weeks I undertook the trailer task, I spend hours searching for the right music to go with the video, don’t know why, but that feels important to me and feelings are important, so I spent the time.
I worked on some re-photography and copied then printed some word I had redacted as a photo, the re-photography was full of analogy for me, being able to sustain the essence of the page after redacting some of it, felt good. I had personal investment in the magazine and didn’t want to destroy it. Though that leads me to the question, can destruction be creative, do something new come from the destruction of the old? is it equal to what was there previously?
Tribesmen at the foot of civilisation
Now, I have to admit to a little bit of an epiphany here.
AZOULAY, Ariella. 2016. ‘Photography Consists of Collaboration: Susan Meiselas, Wendy Ewald, and Ariella Azoulay’. Camera obscura. 31, 187–201.
The theme that I am trying to keep central to my work right now is mental health. Although the above work is based around the madness of war and how we perceive it, I want to really focus on mental health. Over the past weeks I have been focussing on patients or service users as we like to call them, I prefer people, but clinical convention doesn't’t always sit smoothly with that idea. Today the focus has shifted slightly.
I attended an inclusion conference at work, and although it was aimed at improving services for said SU’s! it really dawned on me that those staff who are part of a minority group were living with a stigma too, black, gay, trans-gender, muslim, brown or disabled, many of them with their own heartbreaking story of how simply being them was something they had, and in some cases continue to have feelings such as guilt, post trauma and many other issues that I am no expert on, but something I recognise a little of in my journey from a white working class lad to a muslim, married to a woman if Indian heritage and the father of mixed race kids, half casts as I ignorantly used to call them.
Can I tell the mental health story of people who were forced to feel unnatural in themselves, by a society that still struggles to come to terms with that which is different. Can we see them in their best moments as well as their worst? I approached one member of staff to discuss this, it went well, another string to the bow. Perhaps a comparison around the issues felt by people with diagnosed mental health problems and those forced to feel different by the rest of us, all living with stigma.
[19:49] Michelle Sank advised me to research the following people.
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin
Robert Rauschenberg
Paul Seawright
Barbara Kruger
Concereteism
Rossetti I, Brambilla P, Papagno C. Metaphor Comprehension in Schizophrenic Patients. Front Psychol. 2018 May 9;9:670. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00670. PMID: 29867648; PMCID: PMC5954116.
Concerete as a literal meaning of the schizophrenic being unable to decipher metaphors or sarcasm.
