CHARTERS SCHOOL PHOTOGRAPHY DEPARTMENT
5 HOUR CREATIVE CHALLENGEChoose one of the questions below to respond to.
Create a presentation showing your thinking, ideas, methods, mistakes, successes and final outcomes. You can include photographs, diagrams and text as your response. Try to link the work to your chosen theme. All of these ideas have come from The Photographers Playbook by Fulford and Halpern. Well worth a read if you are interested in creative ideas. Creative Challenge 12: Richard Barnes - Collaborating Across Disciplines
Find a student to work with who studies another subject such as science and offer your services as a photographer to document and record their working practice. Write about your interaction even if it leads to nothing. Create a portfolio of images based on the experience. Creative Challenge 13: Adam Bell - Failing to succeed
At the heart of art is failure. Fail often and fail hard. The time and the space to fail are both precious commodities. Take a picture you think, or know, won't work. Try a genre or subject you dislike or find a technical challenge. Explore what you don't like. After all, what you think might work might not for long. Maybe it never did. |
Creative Challenge 14: Melanie Bonaio - Perspective
1. What do you see that others see? 2. What do others see that you don't see? 3. What do you know that nobody knows? 4. What does nobody know? Creative Challenge 15: Yannick Bouillis and Colette Olof - Rejection Letter
1. Write down a list of your two all time favourite photographers. People you like so much that you are unable to choose between them. 2. Now choose one. 3. Write a gentle, friendly and honest email to the one you rejected, explaining in detail why he or she didn't make number one. Creative Challenge 16: Frish Brandt - Step Out of Your Shoes
Go to a museum, gallery or library and find a photograph that you really don't like, that doesn't sing in your key. Just be with it for a while. Get close to it, breathe for a while. Stop saying "I don't like this. Never liked this" and just look. Remember your current favourite photographer is someone else's least favourite photographer. After you have spent some time observing the work go out and try to recreate your version of it. Creative Challenge 17: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin - Alias
1. Invent the name and biography of a fictional photographer. He or she can be from the past, present or future. Write a synopsis of the photographer's life and practice on a single sheet of paper. 2. Find someone to sit with and introduce your fictional character as if it were you. 3. Then pass it over to the other person. 4. Read the text you have received and make a series of photographs as if you were the fictional person described on the page. Imagine that you are inhabiting that persona. Enjoy not being yourself for a while. This work should not resemble anything you have made before because it is not your work! 5. Keep a diary of your thinking, processes and experiences on Sway as this fictional character. Creative Challenge 18: Michael Christopher Brown - Seven photographs
Take one photograph a day for one week. The idea is to be focused enough to only photograph what is absolutely necessary. What are the seven pictures that not only define the week but yourself? This exercise can be an important analysis of the self in relation to life and photography. Creative Challenge 19: David Campany - What to Photograph?
Working in a group. Each student thinks of an instruction, an object, a place or scenario to be photographed. The ideas are grouped together. Each student then takes one photograph for each idea. The work is laid out with each persons response in a row to see how different students responses are based on the same starting point. Possible ideas could be A red ball, a tree and a dog, a random photo, grass and concrete, flowing water, an empty room, things in a line. Creative Challenge 20: J Carrier - Five obstructions
Placing limits or obstructions on oneself can be liberating, removing the demands of decision making and the dilemma of choice. Constraints allows you to focus, hone in on process. Pick a favorite image either by you or by another photographer. You are going to reproduce this photograph. 1. You have twelve frames. 2 You have five hours and must work alone. 3. You must shoot using your mobile phone. 4. You cannot travel further than 2 miles. 5. There must be a toy in your photograph. Creative Challenge 21: Melissa Catanese - The Arrangement Game
Start with a large stack of photographs. Begin the exercise by separating groups of ten to fifteen images, seeking out simple visual connections such as colour, shapes, textures, types). Play around with the obvious settings as well as some of the more unusual associations. Lay your groups out in a line or a pyramid shape. Once you are happy then photograph the group and start again with a different association. This exercise will help you to better understand the links between your work and the work of others. Creative Challenge 22: Matthew Connors - Physical Laws
Using household items, construct devices that will illustrate one or more of the following laws of physics: Snells law (the refraction law) the Tyndall effect Lamberts third law Archimedes principle Newton's laws of motion. Photograph them. Present them. |