As part of the Sustainable Prospects module of the Master of Arts, I’m collaborating with a group of fellow MA students on a ‘live brief’ for a company that develops unique design, information and wayfinding solutions to integrate people, movement and places.

During this module I’ve focused on practicing sustainable photographic collaboration through the ‘live brief’ project. In previous modules I’ve worked closely with my tutors and participated in the weekly webinars with fellow students. For this module, I’ve opted to participate in weekly meetings with the collaborative team working on the live brief.

Since our first meeting in early October this teamwork has been, in reality, a kind of weekly group tutorial. A genuine team spirit emerged (as we formed, stormed, normed, and performed) and we managed to keep each other going through the tough times. There was always one of us on the up, which kept the team motivated.

This type of collaboration is what photographic collaborative practice is really about, and why my personal approach to long-term collaborative business relationships prefers the use of LinkedIn as one of my digital communication channels. Together with my portfolio website and twitter account, these social media channels embody my principle of long-term partnerships and exchange on professional photography and the socio-political issues which drive me to create photographic images.

“The photo industry runs on word of mouth, so you must strive constantly to develop an excellent reputation” [Fordham 2015: 32]

It’s therefore necessary to treat every job as the pitching opportunity to get the next one, and every collaboration as a professional one.

Here I present my contribution to the team effort which culminated in a presentation of our preliminary thoughts about the ‘live brief’ to our module leader and course coordinator on 1st November.

We’d been discussing colour segregation as a means of visualizing agency in the cityscape.

But how does such an image and collaborative effort across time zones evolve? It evolves both structurally and organically.

During our discussions Amy had suggested using 35mm run through a medium format camera as a technique and Buzz had scouted locations and registered a number of test images (Fig. 1).

I then used one of the images taken by Buzz to explore the application of colour theory in the development of the digitalized images. The concept of colour segmentation was intended to express individualism, agency and inclusivity in modern society through the use of the seven colours of the rainbow.

As an alternative creative approach – again picking up on an idea suggested by Amy that we could emulate line drawings – I developed an offset image, with a view to accentuating the outline of the individuals and an architect’s sketch like rendering of the urban landscape [Fig. 3].

The concept would not make the final cut of our pitch to the client, as other ideas were emerging, and overall we agreed that the images with the film sprockets would become repetitive: elements of the client brief were emerging and the images would be used to accompany a series of essays on agency in a smart city future, and we agreed that while interesting, we needed to follow another approach.

Since the book would act both as a reference document for the client’s business sector, as well as providing visibility, helping to establish our client’s position at the forefront of wayfinding in the urban environment we wanted to explore further the concept of agency in the SMART city.

That meant we would need to communicate the essence of what it means to be human: that is, the capacity to think, decide, act, and to dream.

 

Sources

Fordham, D. (2015) What they didn’t teach you in photo school: what you actually need to know to succeed in the industry. London: Octopus Publishing. ISBN 978-1-78157269-6