Final thoughts

The MA has been a long journey full of learnings and discoveries. It hasn’t been easy, but it has been worth it. I have struggled a lot with deadlines and repeated COVID-19 lockdowns, I have constantly been pushed out of my comfort zone, and my practice has changed immensely.

The Falmouth Symposium portfolio reviews, as well as constant feedback from Falmouth tutors and peers, were extremely useful and though-provoking. I learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t and why, about editing and sequencing, and about how to build a visual narrative for a specific audience. I have also become more confident in taking about my work, and in contextualizing it.

I still need to progress on many levels, including improving my skills related to software tools like photoshop and InDesign and I would love to explore alternative processes with more depth.

Below is my FMP submission.

FMP-Isabelle Boutriau.pdfDownload

Supervision meeting 7 (final)

Date of Supervision Meeting	4 August 2021
Start time of Meeting	11am
Length of Meeting in minutes	36 minutes
Meeting Notes & Action Points	Discussion focused on my final submission (edited version of my project, including the strongest images) and the various outcomes, and on the group exhibition at Four Corners Gallery. Feedback was very positive overall.
Date of Next Proposed Meeting	Final feedback on 7 September 2021

Second photobook dummy

Here is the link to my second photobook dummy, which, I felt, was necessary as my project really developed since the first iteration, and gained in depth. For the final layout, I was very lucky to offered some help from Adobe InDesign expert Hilde Maassen, and artist and graphic designer Christoper Jeauhn Bayne. The text is presented on tinted pages for additional emphasis on the message. The archive photographs are presented on pages with a slightly different texture, to give a family album touch.

Critical Review of Practice

Below is the pdf I submitted yesterday morning.

crop_isabelle_boutriauDownload

The challenges of sequencing

Now that I seem to have most of the images to convey my message, I have started sequencing and pairing images to give more strength to the narrative. Not an easy task. The purpose is to create a narrative that carries the reader/viewer from the first page to the last. It is a time-consuming task as you need to step back, think and then come back to the work, look at it in a fresh way and modify needed. Collaboration with “a viewer” is essential in this respect as you need to check how the images are read. Feedback, feedback and feedback! I was very happy to get feedback from Dinu Li, who really has expertise on the matter.

J. Colbert, in Understanding Photobooks (2017) devotes a whole section on sequencing. The purpose is to create a logical flow from the beginning to the end, to take the viewer on a journey, to get them to see what you saw, to follow your ideas and intention. “The book has a beginning and an end” (2017:95). A key word is movement, and using color or shapes is essential to produce a language, a story, not a catalogue. You have to create a rhythm, with pauses, and weaker photographs are useful in this respect. Visual clues, connecting one image to the other, is another key term.

“…establishing whatever a photobook centers on is one of the first and most important aspects of creating a sequence” (2017:96).

The photographer has to decide which the direction they want the story to take. Then, it is about creating tension, about what you would like the reader to feel, and it is essential to include pauses. One should let the reader connect things. It might be a good idea to avoid being too literal or easy.

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Isabelle Boutriau, Vienna, 2021

References

COLBERG, Jörg. 2017. Understanding Photobooks: The Form and Content of the Photographic Book. London : New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group.

Holly Stuart Hughes, 2018.‘The Art and Process of Sequencing Photo Books’.  PDN Online [online]. Available at: https://pdnonline.com/features/photo-books/art-process-sequencing-photo-books/ [accessed 19 Jul 2021].

On identity and migration

While drafting my Critical Review of Practice, I found an interesting article written by Maria Caterina La Barbera on the influence of migration on identity formation and transformation.

When arriving in the “receiving country”, migrants have to (re)construct their identity.

“Indeed, leaving their country of origin, migrants lose their social status, family, and social networks. In the receiving country, they find themselves without a history and without an image. Faced with an unknown universe of meanings, migrants feel lost, alone, and without reference points. As much as they strive to become integrated, migrants remain strangers. Moreover, migrants face distrust and hostility. The harsh reality of exclusion differs from the idealized image of the receiving country as a place to better one’s life that originally drives migrants to leave their country of origin. Disillusionment and nostalgia contribute to idealizing the country of origin, which is in turn beautified through memory. However, when the migrant returns home, the contrast between the ideal and the real reappears. To a certain extent, migrants live between idealization and disillusionment both in the receiving country and in the country of origin. Their new condition is in between, at the borderland, in transit. The process that begins when one leaves his/her own country never ends, and it generates an unfinished condition of not yet belonging “here” but no longer “there”.” (La Barbera. 2015: 3″).

This is exactly in keeping with the message I would like to convey in my project. This condition of in-betweenness is at the core of migration. Migrants are “people in transit”.

“The very notion of home is questioned by considering that it can be defined as the place where one is born or where one grows up, the place where the family of origin lives, or the place where one lives and works as an adult in an exclusive or simultaneous way. One can actually have several “homes” that only partially match with the physical places. Nonetheless, the sense of belonging appears to be a crucial step in the processes of formation and identity reconstruction for refugee and migrant women. Their desire for roots and stability and belonging challenge the traditional constructs of social codes and national boundaries.” (2015:4)

The issue of “home” and the complexity of identity has been of interest to many writers.

Caribbean-born British writer Caryl Phillips, in an article published in the Guardian in 2004, writes : ” However, I belong not only to the British tradition, I am also a writer of African origin and, for people of the African diaspora, “home” is a word that is often burdened with a complicated historical and geographical weight. This being the case, travel has been important for it has provided African diasporan people with a means of clarifying their own unique position in the world.” Phillips explains how he embarked on an odyssey across Europe, fleeing Britain in the 80’s, seeking a richer sense of identity. He felt that in order to progress, grow and develop, I would have to be very careful about the way his identity “was being buffeted and twisted by societal forces”. Acknowledging his “plural self” and “the full complexity “of who he is, he sensed that he had to protect his own identity, in all its intricacy, “as unique, complicated, open to inspection and re-examination, and binding me not just to a particular tribe, clan, or race, but to the human race”.

References

LA BARBERA, MariaCaterina (ed.). 2015. Identity and Migration in Europe: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. vol. 13. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Available at: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-319-10127-9 [accessed 19 Jul 2021].

PHILLIPS, Caryl. 2004. ‘Caryl Phillips on Race, Class and a European Odyssey’. the Guardian [online]. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/dec/11/society2 [accessed 19 Jul 2021].

Guest Lecture: Almudena Romero (February 2021)

A very interesting lecture on alternative photographic processes, in particular printing on leaves. This is something I intend to experiment with after the MA.

Almudena Romero’s Performing Identities (2018-2019) project is particularly relevant to my own project. Romero organized an open call where she asked people who identified themselves as immigrants would come to her studio to be photographed, using the wet colloquium process. She realized that the performance of coming to the studio and of making the picture was more important than the pictures as such. This is exactly what I felt in conducting my project in collaboration with migrant women in Vienna.

Romero’s Family Album project also caught my attention as it relates to sustainability, to the materiality of photography. Romero uses organic matter/pigments to reflect an ‘aesthetics of fragility’. The experiments result in image-objects.

On her website, she describes:

“Family Album plant-based photographs grow, develop and disappear. These photographs are on a constantly evolving state that on one side, questions the spaces and forms where photography exists, and on the other, reflects on the idea of using photography to leave a legacy in the current context of permanent crisis (environmental, social, economic, political and now sanitary too). “

References

Almudena Romero, Guest Lecture.2021. Available at: https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/login/ldap [accessed 18 Jul 2021].

‘The Pigment Change’. 2021. Almudena Romero [online]. Available at: https://www.almudenaromero.co.uk/thepigmentchange [accessed 18 Jul 2021].

‘Studio Almudena Romero – YouTube’. 2021. [online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNGQa8cCRFBtsuMxH4ho8hw [accessed 18 Jul 2021].

, Les Rencontres.D’ARLES. 2021. ‘Almudena Romero’. [online]. Available at: http://www.rencontres-arles.com//en/artistes/view/785/ [accessed 18 Jul 2021].

Supervisory meeting 6

Date of Supervision Meeting	14 July 2021
Start time of Meeting	11:00
Length of Meeting in minutes	30
Meeting Notes & Action Points	The discussion with Wendy focused on my F-2-F presentation. Positive feedback, also on my choice of images, and on the outcome of the photo-book workshop that I attended in Arles. I should make sure the images taken to illustrate this are top (white balance for example).It was suggested I should look at the case studies, in particular  how Amy Lawrence documented her book.  I raised a question related to the debate associated with the term “expatriate”. Wendy suggested to use “outsider” instead, which I also feel fits better.  It was recommended I should work on the lay-out and combine some images to create a dialogue. It should result also in something intriguing for the viewer. Maybe add some text (a few words about the women). I mentioned my intention to collaborate with a graphic designer. For the next meeting, I should prepare different iterations of the pdf.
Date of Next Proposed Meeting	4 August

Evening Critique Session with Dinu Li

Before the session, Dinu suggested I should send him a wider file to see how I made my selection and pointed to some other images that I could add. This was really useful as I feel it is so important to get precise feedback from someone more experienced, and get expert support to push my work further, all the more so as I feel a bit stuck at the moment. I keep changing the sequencing of my images.

At the critique session, Dinu suggested I should darken some of my landscape images. Discussion was on my choice of images and what I read in them, and on what it does to the conversation when you combine images. Text elements seem to be fine. And  family archive photos are always good to look at. Dinu also suggested creating one book, in different chapters, rather than several separate books. Phil Hill suggested having a look at Simon Norfolk.

Here is my portfolio as of 14 July.

fmp-14-julyDownload

The discussion about my peers’ work was quite instructive.

One person presented her landscape images. Dinu explained we are like painters: everything on the canvas is important. So, it is essential to stick to what is key to the message, and get rid of all non-essential elements. One has to be very specific and show ONLY what one wants to tell. Reference was made to Richard Long and his traces in the landscape art made by walking in the landscape). “Make life difficult”, was the tip given. I think this is really good advice. One tends to repeat the same images again and again. To evolve and discover new things, it is of course essential to leave your comfort zone as much as possible.

Andrew presented his book dummy focussing on portraits of people with mental health issue in a working-class area in Manchester. Reference was made to Irish-born Tom Wood, who photographed the working-class people of Liverpool in their daily lives. Wood’s work has “consistency of tone and feeling “. Interesting remark about publishing a zine that could be given to the people of that area, cheap and rough, compared to a book.

Marcel’s project really evolved and much attention is given to the outcome side, with pop-up books, wooden objects etc. Reference was made to Peter Fraser‘s Material project.

Phill’s work also develops in a very interesting way. I am always very curious as his work also focuses on archives, but the angle he chose is very different from mine.

References

‘RICHARD LONG OFFICIAL’. 2021. [online]. Available at: http://www.richardlong.org/ [accessed 14 Jul 2021].

LENSCULTURE, Tom Wood |. 2021. ‘Men/Women – Photographs by Tom Wood’. LensCulture [online]. Available at: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/tom-wood-men-women [accessed 14 Jul 2021].

‘TOM WOOD: MAKING SENSE’. [online]. Available at: https://issuemagazine.com/tom-wood-making-sense/ [accessed 14 Jul 2021].

Material 2002 | Peter Fraser’. 2021. [online]. Available at: https://www.peterfraser.net/projects/material-2002/ [accessed 14 Jul 2021].

Rinko Kauwachi

Rinko Kauwachi is a Japanese photographer that inspires me a lot. I discovered her evocative series ‘Illuminance’ in Kunsthaus Vienna some years ago. I love the serenity that transpires from her images. Kauwachi’s photographs are like haikus of mundane scenes of everyday life. They depict the simplicities of daily life. What really appeals to me is her subtle use of light, the poetical flair of her working the ethereal quality of her landscapes. The viewer feels like in a dream, in the liminal space between reality and fantasy.

Kauwachi’s series‘The river embraced me’ was shot in the context of an open call for images about Kumamoto and its environs, in collaboration with its inhabitants.

In Kawauchi’s work, there is a constant interaction between reality and the spiritual world, some magical realism associated with the mundane. Kauwachi contemplates our relationship with nature and the cycle of life, and shows us that nature is not only beautiful, but also a place of refuge.

Rinko Kauwachi, Untitled from the series “‘The River Embraced Me”, 2016.

References

‘Rinko Kawauchi’. 2021. Christophe Guye Galerie [online]. Available at: https://christopheguye.com/artists/rinko-kawauchi/selected-works [accessed 13 Jul 2021].

WARNER, Marigold, 2020, ‘Rinko Kawauchi: As it is’. Available at: https://www.1854.photography/2020/11/rinko-kawauchi-as-it-is/

‘Rinko Kawauchi’. 2021. Rinko Kawauchi [online]. Available at: http://rinkokawauchi.com/en [accessed 13 Jul 2021].

MA Students Presentation

I took part in the FMP presentation at Falmouth’s face-to-face event, together with 4 other peer students. A bit challenging for me to talk about my work in English on Zoom… but an excellent exercise to prepare for the critical review of practice.

Really amazing to see how the work of my fellow peers evolved. Really some excellent work. Tim’s moving objects are striking. I really enjoyed Phill’s presentation and contextualization, Marcel’s documentary/historical project in Germany and his outcome constructions in wood or paper, Ross’s amazing masculinity portraits, and Victoria’s amazing abstract fashion photography.

Here is the pdf of my presentation.

Key points were the mix of archival material, portraiture, landscapes, still lives and text to compose my visual story, collaboration with the people photographed and how to involve the audience.

Public outcome will be as follows:

• photo book dummy (created in Arles);

• self-published photobook in collaboration with a graphic designer;

• book-signing event with small pop-up exhibition, preceded by a workshop on creating a photo album;

• online diffusion (my personal website and Instagram page)

• diffusion in the context of the collective created together with my German Bight’s peer “The Long Exposure”, their website, Instagram and Facebook pages);
• Collective exhibition at the Four corners gallery in Bethnal Green, London, in October 2021 (https://www.fourcornersfilm.co.uk/gallery).

fmp-presentation-falmouth-8-julyDownload

Falmouth’s online face-to-face event

Portfolio Reviews

Again a great opportunity to attend portfolio reviews and get direct feedback, which is something I am constantly looking forward to. Feedback is the key to evolution.

Here is my portfolio as of 7 July

maybe-i-will-leave-7-july-2021Download

Clare Bottomley

Clare asked me whether I was aware the term “expatriate” carried colonialist connotations and that I was challenging stereotypes by presenting women with a dark skin in that context. The term “expatriate” seems to have some specific negative connotations in English, which are not so strong in a Francophone or Hispanic context.

Overall, Clare felt the series was working fine. She suggested I should still work on sequencing the series, but felt the photos “were there”. She also suggested I could add some material about myself.

Colin Pantall

Colin was quite please with the way my portfolio evolved since last month. “A huge difference”, he said. He found the landscapes I added fitted very well and enjoyed my use of archival material. In particular, the portrait that I took of Agathe in front of a reddish door and that I rephotographed using a translucent vellum sheet, which gives a special texture to the photograph, giving the impression that the image is also part of the family album. Colin suggested I could use that technique to give a feel of “family album” to the whole series and also with the landscapes and the recent portrait of Omaima, and maybe also work to improve the composition of that image. I fully agree as I realized Omaima was not totally relaxed when I took the image, and that the composition would be much better if she were seen from a slightly different angle, for example oblique. He pointed out to the weaker images in the series, which is really useful as I am now “killing my darlings” to keep only the stronger images. Colin liked the way I blur past and present and places, in keeping with the identity concept.

On the term “expatriate” and connotations

I was really puzzled by Clare’s remark on using the term “expatriate”, which seems to have some strong connotations in English. I have already researched the topic in academic publications, but not really in the media. So many terms do have connotations : migrants, immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, expats, exiled, aliens, foreigners, etc. The Obama administration even proposed the term ” Dreamers “as a new positive way – with its reference to the American Dream – of describing undocumented young people who met the conditions of the Dream act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) (see ‘The Battle over the Words Used to Describe Migrants’. 2015. BBC News ).

I found an interesting article in the Guardian, with a provocative title: “Why Are White People Expats When the Rest of Us Are Immigrants?” The author states : “In the lexicon of human migration there are still hierarchical words, created with the purpose of putting white people above everyone else. One of those remnants is the word “expat”.”

So it does seem indeed that my project is effectively challenging that stereotype. It seems to me that once the term is defined clearly, there is no issue. Well, the Latin etymology of the term is very clear to me, and using it in the context of my project (presenting women without any restriction as to the color of their skin) means effectively challenging that stereotype, I firmly believe it is a good thing !

However, after discussing the issue with Wendy and listening to her suggestions, I decided I would use the term “outsider”, which is exactly what I feel about my situation in Austria.

References

KOUTONIN, Mawuna Remarque. 2015. ‘Why Are White People Expats When the Rest of Us Are Immigrants?’ the Guardian [online]. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/mar/13/white-people-expats-immigrants-migration [accessed 7 Jul 2021].

DEWOLF, Christopher. 2014. ‘In Hong Kong, Just Who Is an Expat, Anyway?’ Wall Street Journal, 30 Dec [online]. Available at: https://blogs.wsj.com/expat/2014/12/29/in-hong-kong-just-who-is-an-expat-anyway/ [accessed 7 Jul 2021].

‘The Battle over the Words Used to Describe Migrants’. 2015. BBC News, 28 Aug [online]. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34061097 [accessed 7 Jul 2021].