Additional Projections

I felt that I should show more than just two examples of the experimental projections I have been playing with and so here are some additional photos.

Pheasants, Transparencies and an Over-Head Projector

As mentioned before I was struck by the direct 1:1 scale that Richard Learoyd employed when constructing and displaying his work. Obviously the resources and funds available to me in creating my own work could not rival Learoyd's, however I could still experiment with scale, something which I have been meaning to do for some time now.

In keeping with my Polaroid approach I wanted to keep the projections rooted in the physical object, though this may seem somewhat contradictory as the projection is an ephemeral creation of light. I did not feel that projecting an image which was a digitally encoded copy of the original would be particularly beneficial to my project, other than to alter the scale of the image and so shied away from using a digital projector and laptop. After having experimented with emulsion lifts and looking particularly at the transparent qualities that the images possessed I felt that this would be a way of projecting them which was truer to my original concept.

I projected the images onto a bare interior wall. This allowed me to capture both the projected image and the texture of the wall, giving another dimension to the images. The limitations of depth of field become apparent in these images again, as the images dry they become fragile and almost brittle, the image becomes distorted and the parts of the transparency not flat to the platen at the base of the projector are not in sharp focus. Colours also suffer somewhat when using this method of projection however I feel that the 'physical' approach to the projection of my images does in some way benefit from these limitations. I also experimented with the idea of distorting the image by the angle of the projection, as can be seen below, the image becomes stretched by projecting it into a corner, whilst one plane can still be seen clearly.

The 'hand-crafted' and 'unique' aesthetic adds rather than detracts, suggesting echoes of the past projected onto the present physical surface. In a way I feel that this could even link to the work of another artist, Rachel Whiteread, whose works such as Ghost (upper) and House (lower), are interior casts of inhabited spaces. The space is coated with plaster and as the plaster casts are pulled away from the original surfaces, detritus and residual traces of previous inhabitants are fixed into it to create an almost 'negative' image of the original. Whiteread's work is also on a scale of 1:1, the casts being created direct from the original space and, in the case of Ghost and House, erected on the site of the initial building. The works deal with filling the uninhabited space, as in her later works in which she cast around books in a library, titled Nameless Library.

I feel that in displaying my work I can utilise the approaches of both Learoyd and Whiteread regarding scale and their individual aspects of the unique image and the residual traces of history held by an object. As a final display for my work a projection of some sort onto a surface with 'history' may be something to consider, this would preferrably be some sort of enclosed interior space rather than an exterior wall.

Richard Learoyd and the Camera Obscura

Richard Learoyd's images are quietly unique. He captures his subjects with a shallow focus and soft, subtle colours and tones through a particular and somewhat unusual method, utilising a modern Camera Obscura, a camera the size of a room. The camera itself is fixed, as opposed to the traditional camera which is brought to a scene or an object to document it, instead, with Learoyd's camera the objects are brought to it. This also adds to the impression of crystalline moments captured outside of time, there is no constantly shifting and changing background which is captured, rather, the beautiful clear images which seem removed from the world outside the rooms of the camera, his images are 'sustained within their own hermetic condition'. His subjects are intimate, ranging from straight portraits to tableaux of dead animals, with compositions which have been described as 'artless' yet 'belie complex and restrictive rules dictated by the physics and optics of light' (see bibliography at end for consulted sources).

His images hold a quality that is so removed from context and temporality perhaps because the very method by which they are made dates back to the dawn of photography. Described as carrying 'visual echoes of the past' the limitations of the camera create a sense of stillness and serenity, complete with shallow focus and vignettes akin to the low-tech approach of modern Holga users as in the image below. (Richard Learoyd, 'Agnes with Eyes Closed', 2007. Museum no. E.421-2008)

Learoyd's images are also particularly interesting when brought to bear on my own project, his images, as with Polaroid, are completely unique. Each image is created by projecting onto positive photo-paper and developed in the very room in which it is exposed, this means there is no interposing negative, whatever is written onto the paper is written in direct light alone, this gives an indefatigable truth to the images. This has been described as Learoyd's search for the 'ultimate' image, coupled with the scale of his images, which are 1:1 with his original subject. This specific trait has been described as the image being 'concieved as a whole, not as fragments or miniaturisations of objects and people' unlike most photography.

Where my work resembles Learoyd's in its creation of a unique image which cannot be directly copied or mimicked, it differs in its approach to scale and presentation. My own images are small, limited as they are by the Polaroid film which I chose to use, fixed at their present size of 3.25" by 4.25", whereas Learoyd's displays are life-size, images which sit on the same scale as the viewer. I began to experiment with ways to address this which I will discuss in my next post.

Bibliography:

(Some websites have been consulted but not quoted from.)

http://www.union-gallery.com/content.php?page_id=2640

http://www.vam.ac.uk/images/image/46053-popup.html

http://mckeegallery.com/exhibit/2009/richard-learoyd-unique-photographs/

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/lucydavies/100001214/richard-learoyd/

http://www.artrabbit.com/uk/events/event&event=3624

Pheasants and Snow

We were recently given some pheasants by a family friend who goes shooting. For me this was an unexpected treat as I had been meaning to photograph these for some time. I had particularly wanted to photograph them with my Polaroid camera and so now was my chance. I took the two birds out into the garden and hung them in a few different places, lighting the images with a single hotshoe flash held in my hand. The first attempts were not so successful, the pheasants were hung from a hook in my shed, I was hoping for an eclectic and rustic feel with all the clutter as a background but it wasn't working so well so I decided to use a similar approach to how I had photographed flowers previously.

I took the pheasants outside and hung them against plainer and flatter backgrounds. In the image below I hung the pheasants on a corner of the shed and included the trees in as well so as to further connect with my previous images of flora. The image bears some resemblance to Renaissance still-life paintings in which dead animals or more simply 'meat' were a symbol of wealth and distinction. The pheasants plumage is also particularly striking in an image, though the colours are somewhat muted in this particular photograph.

The images with which I most associate the depiction of pheasants with, however, are not historical paintings of the landed gentry and their landscapes but instead the work of a photographer called Richard Learoyd. His image below struck me, as well as his method of working being particularly interesting, in that he uses a walk-in camera obscura, which I will discuss in a later post.

I also took further pictures against plain backgrounds, hanging the pheasants from a clothes-line pole, this did give me a more empty background and allowed the colours to stand out far more effectively but did leave me with images which contained elements I did not want in there, the image below is an example of this. I considered editing out these elements in Photoshop however decided to discard it from my more finalised work as I felt that working in Polaroid film requires un-tampered with pictorial reality and the results of my Photoshopping would not be visible on the original image anyway. I believe there is an intrinsic link between Polaroid and the 'Truth', however subjective it may be. This edited image is furthest below.

The Low-Fi Approach to Video, The Harinezumi and Super 8

It began to occur to me that using a mini dv camera for the video aspect of a project which began with a holga, old polaroid camera and instant film didn't quite add up. As the approach I started out with was using simple, out-dated technology so as to produce a physical object, using a video camera whereby the end product is a well-controlled, well-exposed image in the form of a piece of digital encoding didn't quite seem to fit.

I thought back to a product I had seen a few months ago, The Harinezumi digital video camera(below).

This camera is a small, compact and fairly low-tech approach to video, from Superheadz, in the same vein as the Holga or Diana. The Harinezumi's aesthetics are dream-like, with a strong emphasis on the "artless" over the perfected image. With only a 2mp CCD sensor the images lack the definition and contrast of a more typical video camera yet have a charm of their own. Even the LCD screen which usually comes as standard is discarded when shooting on the Harinezumi camera, instead relying on a small square plastic view-finder which pops up just above the lens, in a similar design to the Ikimono 110 cameras (below). Below is an example of the kind of footage the Harinezumi captures.

Not ony do the Harinezumi's images harken back to earlier 8mm film stock, (traditionally used to capture family movies) just like 8mm film sound is absent. I feel that using this camera would be useful to my work but I didn't feel I could justify spending over a hundred pounds on such a low-tech camera. Instead I began to research alternative ways of getting a 'low-tech' and ultimately outdated look to my film, relying on the medium over cheap after effects in Finalcut. I then discovered that both 8mm and Super 8 film were still available to buy and develop. Though development costs are fairly high the initial start-up for the equipment- camera, projector and film splicer- were relatively cheap.

I intend to use Super 8 film over 8mm as, though both offer the warmly-toned grainy images Super 8 has a larger film area, magnetic sound-strip and creates a direct film strip over the colour-negative of the 8mm, which then requires a print to be made of it before it can be projected. This also links to my original polaroid idea of the intangible becoming a physical object.(below: upper-Super 8 film. lower- 8mm film.)

'Flash' Films Attempt 2

Following on from my previous attempt to film flowers in the dark with a hotshoe flash I decided to go for a more controlled set-up. I had learned from my previous experiments with this technique that the results were tempermental at best, often the video camera would not catch the flash at all, leaving an entirely black screen, other times the frame would only be half-exposed. As well as this there were problems when transferring from the tape to the mac, often frames shot at a high shutter speed are skipped over and, as each flash is only a few hundredths of a second this means that no image appears in the shot at all.

To ensure atleast some video footage I decided to shoot at all the speeds available on the camera, from 1/50th to 1/2000th of a second. I also used a reflector so as to bounce more light back into the shot and hopefully give a more professional look to the shots. A great drawback when shooting at such high speeds and relying on an exposure which is barely registered by the naked eye is that, without a slow-motion playback setting on the camera the results cannot be seen or any problems rectified until played back in the edit-suite. With the method I employed I was more or less shooting blind.

The video below is the edited results of this experiment. Many of the shots did not work the way I had planned, common problems were the changing colour of the shots, the splitting of shots into upper and lower frames, as can be seen in the first two attempts, and the amount of static shots which this method leads to.

I have also begun working on a sound-scape which should hopefully hold the film together and add more action or intrigue. I also intend to cut down some of the shots, particularly the long static shots of the plants lit against the background. I intend to re-shoot this in the studio, however do not expect greatly improved results and so, as an alternative to this, will begin to look at shooting more well-lit images, not lit by a flash, and playing them back in slowmotion so as to still link to this. Again Zabriskie Point will be a referrence for this. I also intend to continue with the idea of the fragile made solid by playing with the audio track for this idea, the idea I have, though quite trite and cliched, is the use of a sound-scape made from the noises of glass played whilst flowers fall in slow-motion. Though I do not intend to continue this as my final piece I feel it is a valuable stepping stone towards some sort of resolution of this project.

Juxtapositions

In my previous post I mentioned how I had attempted to photographs limbs, mostly arms, to attempt to create a parallel between them and the plants, I did not feel that this comparison was clear, despite using the same medium and lighting them similarly. To try to draw out the parallels, at first simply in the aesthetics, I began to place them next to each other, to juxtapose. The images seemed to highlight the similarities of the images, the leading lines in each images matched fairly closely, as can be seen in the image below, but I began to realise that, whereas the photographs of flowers trailed off quite organically into the darkness, it was far more difficult to apply this to limbs, which lead to the edge of the frame cutting off the arm at some point.

I felt that the more I experimented with placing these arms next to the flowers the more macabre and tense the results. The framing of the arm and the way the edges cut the limbs began to look more like dismembered limbs and the reaching fingers, instead of looking like fronds of a tree or blades of grass, began to look like the searching hands of zombies from some Romero film. As well as this the tension between the two images, particularly above, wherein the left contains quite a powerful and forceful image and the right contains a low-key and quite calm image (when viewed on its own) further added to the idea that these two images had come together and created a third meaning.

Weed Scans

Following somewhat in the vein of Denis Doran again I began to think about using the scanner to create some work. Unlike his work in Common Grounds, I am not tied to a particular location or space, therefore the collection of ephemera would be a process which would add little to my work, as well as this the idea of collecting objects which exist already in a physical capacity would not fit with my concept.

Instead I chose to scan in the plants themselves, this is also to do with the inability to reproduce Doran's technique of a portable flatbed scanner which he brings to the environment, however should yield similar results.

I began by quite simply placing the dried plant onto the scanner, using a black background so as to make it more like my previous work and to avoid the sterility created by an intensely white background. The scanned images can be seen below, however I didn't feel that this quite fitted with my other pieces for several reasons, the image did not have the same 'trailing off' that previous images taken with the polaroid had, the way they gradually faded out into the dark background. They also lacked something compositionally, not containing the quite intimate compsotions previously but looking very clinical and detached. One of these scans can be seen below.

I began to crop the image down into smaller pieces of detail which I felt matched my previous work much better, compositionally and from the aspect of lighting too. This meant that the images did require some work in Photoshop, changing the brightness and contrast, as well as some other simple filters to remove dust etc. As with any scanned images these scans have a very shallow depth of field, yet I feel this adds to these pieces, picking out high-detail and contrasting it with out-of-focus midgrounds and backgrounds. This lends a dream-like quality to the images. Some of the better crops can be seen below.

Polaroid 600 Film- Weeds

As I began working in polaroid I felt that I couldn't continue a project rooted in instant film without atleast experimenting with the iconic 600 film format. The shape is immediatley recognisable, despite the end of production by the polaroid company in early 2009. I began to make photographs using my slightly modified SX-70 Alpha Model 2, which is an SLR polaroid, allowing for more control over the polaroid image. (below)

The interesting thing I noticed about the 600 film is that it is an integral film, in that the chemcials are all contained within the photograph, as opposed to the peel-apart films I have been using previously in this project. Integral films do not expose the surface of the image in the same "naked" way that that peel-apart films do, in integral film the image is always separated from the viewer by a sheet of clear plastic. I felt that this reflected the relationship between the viewer and a display cabinet. I felt it also linked to the artist Arman, who would create collections or "accumulations" and place them in glass boxes called vitrines for exhibition, a more modern equivalent might perhaps be Damien Hirst's Tiger Shark, preserved in formaldehyde, behind a pain of glass. (both below)

I think the images I created, in some way, continue this tradition of preservation behind a transparent material. My subjects for this work were again, flowers at night. I feel that the transparent yet physical material establishes a certain distance between the viewer and the object. We see the image but we cannot touch it and the glass or plastic implies that we must never try to touch it, lest the preserved object break, crack or in some way become compromised by our involvement in its history. Once an object is preserved it is outside of history, up until that point it has existed freely in the world, changing with its environment, once it is taken out of that situation and placed behind glass it becomes valuable and completely unattainable. It becomes an object to view but never again to touch.

Emulsion Lifts- Results

After my previous post on emulsion lifts I started to play with this deceptively simple technique. I began by simply placing the photographic-membranes onto pieces of water-colour paper, as this was the most absorbent and sturdy canvas for these sorts of images (below) but I felt a little dissatisfied with the results. The images, though somewhat more washed-out and wrinkled were not the radical results I was hoping for. The subject I felt would be appropriate for this technique shifted somewhat in that I began to think about limbs and fabrics, more specifically lace and the intrinsic link between women and flowers. In this the limbs and previous photographs of flowers become intrinsically linked, each a metaphor for the other.

The transparency of the emulsion lifts began to interest me, they seemed almost like over-sized projection slides and I began to experiment with the idea of projecting them. I affixed one image to a sheet of acetate as can be seen below. I plan to attempt this with a few other emulsion lifts and look at the results of projecting them using an OHP. They take on another quality once the light shines through them, harkening back to stained-glass windows, whilst still holding onto the fragile, brittle and low-tech elements which I have continued from my previous work. My next use of the emulsion lift was to place the image onto a glass jar. This continued from my previous ideas about the transparency and the way the light changed the image as it shone through it. I chose to use a glass jar because of the transparent and fragile qualities as well as the idea of preservation, historically in towards the end of summer and the beginning of autumn families would preserve food, jams, fruits, vegetables, in glass jars as foods through the winter. As well as this there is the idea of preserving collections, such as insects, behind glass. In a museum we begin look at tableaus of dead animals, stuffed and arranged behind glass.

There is also the brittle quality which glass has, particularly in sheets, which I feel resonates with this work. Showing this work in the tutorial suggested some ideas about where to take this work next, which also tied into the fast shutter-speeds used in my early attempts at the video work. The smashing of glass in slowmotion may be the next direction which I take this work in. An influence which has leant quite heavily towards this idea as well is the ending of Zabriskie Point in which explosions and destruction are played in incredibly slow-motion, creating images which almost resemble Philippe Halsman's Dali Atomicus. (both below)

Video- Fast Shutter-speeds and the Hotshoe Flash

After the first presentation and feedback on my work I started to think about the ways that I could combine my photographs and video. My first thought was to attempt to transfer the look of my polaroid images onto film, using similar lighting techniques, thereby drawing an instant parallel and link between the two media. I then began to think of a single shot from the opening of the film The Watchmen. The scene is of a crime scene, a murder, around the 1930s or 40s, the thing which really interested me was the way the slow-motion seemed to near freeze the action, slowing everything down so much that even the flash of the camera can be seen in every stage, as it begins to glow dimly, before increasing in intensity and fading out again. I wondered whether this effect could be applied to my own work, so I took out a video camera and began to experiment.

So as to have the smoothest footage once the shot was played in slow-motion I increased the shutter-speed to 1/1000th of a second, turned off the lights and began to flash my hotshoe on different objects. The problem I encountered with this was that, without the editing software on-camera I couldn't see the results properly until it had been edited, which meant it was particularly difficult to see which shots were working. Once i got the footage into the edit suite I found that there was only a single shot that worked in the way I had hoped. This is below.

There are far better examples of this on youtube, as the links at the end of my short film will no doubt show, however I have learned several things from this experiment so as to improve my work in the future. I intend to retry this piece, using either two flashes or a single flash and reflector, as well as revisiting my original subject, flowers, more specifically weeds. I want the visuals to appear out of obscurity, the darkness, be lit as in my previous images before disappearing in the white flash and falling back into darkness. The sounds I feel should come in waves to accompany the images, rising and peaking at the point the flowers are washed away by the white light. I feel the next step is to film the visuals in the studio and then begin to work on a soundscape.

Denis Doran- Common Grounds and Weeds

Doran's work deals with the autobiographical as well as the natural world, through his studies of flora and the allotment. His work Common Grounds focuses on a specific goegraphical space which is rooted in the contextual background of the working class North East, I felt that this has another level of significance for myself, having been born and raised in the same region. His work Weeds links more closely to my work in its aesthetic approach, photographing detailed close-ups of flowers against a dark background. There is a transcience to these photographs which I feel resonates within my own work on more than the visual level, the flowers being captured at a decisive moment, at the peak of their beauty, before they whither. (below)

In Common Grounds, Doran "assmebles ephemera" and "aids to memory" which are "echoes of significant locations". He often juxtaposes his images which are taken using a flatbed scanner placed directly onto the ground next to the scans of his collected "ephemera", this creates connections between the scraps of items found in the area with the "'virtual' cast of the ground at (our) feet". (below)

Polaroid Techniques- The Emulsion Lift

The second technique unique to this kind of polaroid film, which I alluded to in my previous post, is the emulsion lift. This technique lifts the very fine layer of chemicals from the backing paper, leaving a thin membrane with the original image still on it, which can then be affixed to a multitude of surfaces. The instructions for this technique can be found at the following link:

http://www.alternativephotography.com/process_emulsionlifts.html

This technique may be particularly useful for my project, dealing as I am with the idea of the fragile and the solid and conflating these oppositions. I plan next to photograph something particularly solid, for example, a brick wall, and then attempt an emulsion lift, again playing with the idea of the solid and the fragile. As with the image transfer, this technique is not particularly reliable, the results given can very wildly or fail to work at all. Another drawback of this technique is that images with large areas of black can be very difficult to "lift" from their backing, which means it is unlikely that I can use this for many of my photographs at night. This may take my project in a different direction entirely as I may have to rethink the way I photograph the objects, or begin to look at alternative subjects which are still linked to my original idea.

The image can also be distorted when placing it onto a different surface, either purposefully, placing it onto a textured surface such as a rock, or accidentally, as the membrane tends to shift and dry differently. The images below are two examples of this taken from the websites http://www.polanoid.net/ and http://http://www.alternativephotography.com// . The images yielded often look similar to the work of the painter Francis Bacon, distorted and twisted, particularly with human subjects. This may be an interesting subject to study.

Fragile Flowers- Post 2

Following on from my previous post which talked about my second set of images, I began to look at two processes which are almost exclusive to these kinds of peel-apart film types.

The first of these processes is the image transfer. This is a technique wherein the negative side of the polaroid image, which is usually discarded, is placed firmly onto a receptive surface, such as wood, paper or card. The back of the images is then rubbed evenly before peeling away from the surface after thirty seconds to a minute later.

I experimented with this technique using a variety of materials, with varying degrees of success. I found those that gave the best results were absorbent materials, such as kitchen-roll, napkins and cotton fabrics. Less absorbent materials such as canvas-board and waxed-paper gave very poor results in comparison, often leaving a less distinguished image with large areas missing. The two images below show the varying degrees of success- on the left an image transferred onto a cotton tablecloth and on the right a different image transferred onto the back of a piece of sandpaper.

With all polaroid photographs each image is unique and with the image transfer this is still true, the image cannot be exactly repeated, however, once transferred, though the image loses some quality it gains another attribute. Often the colours change slightly, or on occasion, quite drastically, as well as gaining a third feature by looking at the material is is printed onto. For example, an image of a man lying in the crucifix-position transferred onto a piece of muslin or hessian (linking to the shroud of Turin) would hold quite different connotations to the same image printed onto a page of a handwritten diary.

This was an idea which was voiced during my presentation to the rest of the group, specifically with the image below. Printed onto a piece of kitchen roll, the colours of the original image become almost inverted and the patternation from the material creates a circle of white dots, similar to crop circles or aboriginal art. The object then transcends merely being a photograph or an image transfer but takes on a third meaning, becoming a kind of folk-artifact.

Fragile Flowers- Post 1

I took a second series of images following on from my initial night-flower photographs and began to play with several new concepts and ideas. The first few images were taken towards the end of the twilight hour, which mixes the use of flash, long exposure and available light from the sky to create quite dream-like and abstract images, while little, if anything, is in focus, they do create quite atmospheric images, as below. Rather than using the Holga with the polaroid back as in previous images i chose to use a Polaroid 104 camera, this takes the same kind of peel-apart film but creates images which actually fill the frame rather than the vingette-ed Holga images. It also has the similar qualities, both good and bad, of the Holga, for example, it can also create multiple-exposure images, and has the same drawback as having a very limited focussing range (no closer than three feet).

I then began to work with double-exposures. At first I photographed two completely different flowers and overlapped them, I felt that this could link to the idea of fiction and truth in photography and the project. When we see a polaroid image we automatically assume that what is being photographed is the truth, in that the camera can only photograph what is physically there, and as it is created there and then what we are seeing must be "true". The polaroid photograph is intrinsically linked to the idea of the veracity of the image and the chemical process. This links to Bazin-ian film theories of realism and truth. The double-exposure questions the veracity of the image, often the images are quite subtley double-exposures which at first glance do not appear so unusual. The below images are examples of this.

After these images I started to think about the Cubist attitudes towards multiple angles in their paintings, most famously Picasso's work (below), which often incorporates several different views of the subject as he would move around painting it. I photographed the same lavender plant from three different angles which created multiple-exposed image similar in concept if not style, to cubist works. (left)

Individual Project: Initial Ideas 2- Portraits, Possessions and Relics

Following on from my previous post this one will explain and expand on my secondary idea. The driving force behind this was the work of Sophie Calle and the aesthetics were designed to be similar to the large-format photographs of Chuck Close. The idea was to pose the question "what is the most precious object you own?" to an older person, and then photograph them holding in the object, preferrably partly obscured by their hand. This was designed to show the idea of transition as the experience of life and the physical objects which hold a sentimental importance towards the end of the experience.

I listed Sophie Calle as an influence on this idea after having seen her project The Blind, in which she asked the question "what was the most beautiful thing you have ever seen" to people who were blind. (left) The concept for this is similar the the way a vox-pop functions in tv, the same question being posed over again and again with varying answers. The idea of the vox pop could also lead this project into video.

Chuck Close's influence is quite plainly an aesthetic one. I particularly liked his large format portraits which he then painted using a grid-technique so as to be photo-realistic paintings on an incredibly large scale. (right)

The reason I did not pursue this idea much further than concept and artist research was that I found, after having posed the hypothetical question to several family members their answers were invariably quite intangible things or other family members. For example, asking my mother what the object she felt was the most precious thing she owned was, she replied that it was myself and my sister.

This posed a problem as i had intended a series of portraits of singular individuals holding objects, rather than some quite cliched family portraits. As well as this, the title which I had planned for this project, "Relic", leant itself quite easily to images of older persons clutching some slightly obscured object, for obvious reasons, but not to group portraits of family members.

It also exposed quite a distinct difference in people's conceptions of the notions of monetary value and sentimental value. For example, I found that people could quite easily give the answer to the question "what is the most valuable object you own?" to which the answer, in terms of monetary worth, was usually some item of jewellery or technology, however, the question of a "precious object" was far more problematic to answer.

Thus i decided to focus on my polaroid work over this project as I found it far easier to get off the ground, the subject was far more plentiful and I could think of many more ways to develop and further it.