Monday 28 October 2013

Photography journals

I have been reading a journal, and notice that all reviews on photographers have similar aspects:

They start with the main theme, and then move onto a sum up of context, then have a quote from the photographer with mention to previous work, and then analysis. It usually finishes with where it's being shown.
Many of the projects follow this style, for instance the one in the "British journal of photography", which interviews Diane Smyth on her project "Farmers." The review starts off with a theme introduction- the fashion shoot idea of people versus "real people", and then goes on to talk about context, which in this case is her previous fashion photography. Then it interviews her, asking her why this is an important project, where it came from etc. It then talks about method and analysis of the photos, and then ends with future work and where to see this one. I liked this as a way to quickly sum up a project and anchor it in its historical/cultural place, so when we see the next 5 double-page spreads, we understand their ideas.

Longer written articles might focus deeply on history or cultural influences, or might include an interview with a photographer. One i liked was by Sam Taylor wood, who shot a project called "First Film", the interview signals to us many of the ideas above but in the voice of the artists which is nice, as you can understand why they made creative style choices in their own voice.
there are also short reviews, which slid over the deeper theory and ideas behind the photographs and focus on the more visual aspects. I noticed that more online reviews do this, even within the same journal. They focus more on the more obvious style, and on how to find out more or see previous work- it's much more brief.

I was thinking about my own intro- I might try and imitate (in a way) these types of writing. I would therefore do this:

1) One or two sentence summing up main theme
2) method
3) Context
4) In depth look at various shades of the theme- theory and influential artists
5) Conclusion

This seems to be the most obvious way to do it, and the most popular with the other photographer writers.

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