Brief

Aim:

This elective will provide you with a thorough grounding in contemporary digital photographic practice. It is intended for photographers wanting to extend their digital images technically and conceptually as well as for artists and designers interested in developing skills in digital photographic manipulation. You will work with image adjustment and manipulation techniques to extend your current abilities in this area, as well as gaining an understanding of discourse around digital photographic technologies and applying them to your own work.

Overview:

In this studio paper students will be introduced to photographic digital image manipulation techniques within a broader discussion of the veracity and consumption of digital photographs. They will develop a self-initiated project in response to their specific area of creative practice.

Students will investigate digital image capture, digital image manipulation and digital print production; Traditions of photomontage in art and design disciplines; Theoretical content addressing the debate surrounding digital manipulation of photographs.

Project:

In our contemporary, image-saturated world we now assume that photographic images are constructed rather than presenting an unmediated representation. Decontextualizing objects and events and artificially recontextualizing them is now the norm.

With this in mind, you will be expected to consider how the use of digital technologies will affect the content and reception of your work, and how the use of layout, image blending, layering and selections through digital montage can be utilised to communicate complex ideas.

Photographic practitioners historically have engaged with social issues in a critical way through their work, and this is equally evident today. This assignment will enable you to consider this in your own work by examining one or more of the following contemporary concerns in developing a body of photographic work:

• Media
• Street culture
• Popular culture
• Commodity/commodification
• Humankind’s relationship to the environment
• The politics of the body – medical, gender, sexuality 

From your chosen topic identify a more specific subject matter within it that your work will engage with. You must take a critical position on your chosen topic.

Images used can be from any source - digital photographs, image appropriation (in consultation with your lecturer), document flatbed scanning, etc. You may work in greyscale or colour modes.


Submission:

Compulsory formative assessment Week Six - you are required to present your work in progress, presentations should include: 

• Topic chosen to work with, the specific subject within it, and the position you are taking on it 
• Research completed
• Test work completed
• Ideas about where work will go 

Presentations should last 6 mins

Note: Formative assessments are compulsory and you cannot pass the paper without completing them. If you do not present work at the formative assessment and you do not have documentation explaining your absence, you will be set an appropriate written task to be completed within the week after the assessment was due. 

 
Final submission Week Twelve - You will produce a series of digitally manipulated images critically engaging with your chosen topic. There needs to be clear evidence of digital manipulation in every image. Your work can be presented either as a digital slide show, or a series of prints presented on the wall. Consider what your work is about, how your audience will best encounter it, and how the manipulation affects the audiences reading of your subject matter.

A digital slide show can be any time-based presentation of still images (eg. timed PowerPoint show, stop motion animation etc).

You will also write a 250-word statement contextualising your images in relation to the topic you have chosen. This can be presented on the wall with prints or in your workbook.

You are also required to hand in a workbook which will include: 

• evidence of experimentation and the use of an iterative process in development of your work, which is a process for arriving at a desired result by repeating and analysing, with each cycle moving closer to the desired result;
• evidence of participation in class workshops and development of your technical work beyond the workshops, always considering relevance to your subject matter;
• development of ideas and examples of the work of photographers, artists and designers who influenced your work;
• technical research you have undertaken.

Your workbook may be physical, or digital, or a combination of both.