Tutor Feedback – Assignment 4: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Overall Comments

A decent first stab at critical writing, a number of very agreeable points but definitely an area to work on as much as photographic practice. You will get better as a thinker and practitioner with further commitment to research and writing. Useful and worthwhile material but a conspicuous lack of academic material. This requires more patience and diligence and comes over time, make sure to make better use of UCA’s library and academic journals.

As always very fair comments from my tutor, paraphrased for brevity, both clear on direction of development whilst recognising the positives of what I have completed. Academic reading and writing is a completely new experience for me at this level and I am finding it a challenge to both develop my knowledge of the medium whilst identifying relevant material. I feel a little like I am starting from scratch with this having never studied at this prior to starting this degree and I am both cautious in what I read, mainly sticking to the reading list, as relevancy of work is still something I find hard to decipher. I suppose as my confidence goes the reading of material outside the list will become easier as I will be able to to determine relevancy myself and even benefit from reading non-relevant works as counter or contextual pieces.

Feedback on Assignment

Whilst critical writing may be challenging and intimidating right now, they will allow you to really get into something you care about and will sit alongside your major project.

This is a nice read that’s got plenty going for it so the key is to use these written assignments to hone your approach. Be more mindful of developing your skills bit-by-bit, whilst there is no major concern, hunker down and immersive yourself in literature appropriate to this level of study. Academic research requires a slower and more patient approach, but one that is far more nutritious and rewarding over time.

Tips

• Loosen up a little. There is a stiffness which appears a little like straining to sound academic, Clarity and expression are what we are looking for, formality shouldn’t mean awkward.
• Make lots of notes. At all stages check your development, What are the core ideas? How do they link? Do they add? Have you provided evidence? Are you reasoning or asserting?
• All consider the intention of the artist but not overwhelmed by them. Richard Salkeid’s Reading Photograph’s will help with the understanding of denotation and connotation as well as other ideas. The makers of images can never fully control how viewers read them.
• Your ability to tune into stuffs very promising and ultimately the main thing. All other skills can most definitely be learned.
• Prose in some passages can be a little hard going. Clarity is what you should strive for. Keep it simple.
• While it’s a little uneven here and there the core reading of the image is really good. The trick will be to arrive at this point in a more joined up, clear and critically robust manner, this is where the quality of research is absolutely pivotal.

Again paraphrased for brevity, the comments and directions are useful and reassuring. I do strive to write with a coherent and academic style as I find it doesn’t come naturally and will often find myself wandering in thought if not keep firmly in check. However, I do also feel that in the process of proofing, restructuring and refining that I lose some of my personal touch, I rejected a paragraph on the grounds that it was a tongue in cheek poke at the idea of interpreting images. I do feel it was the right decision due to wanting to communicate a coherent theme but in doing so I feel I lost some of the humour I would normally try to write with.

As with the overall comments, I find the views very balanced and agree that my lack of academic knowledge is holding me back both in creating something which brings an individual view but also my confidence in putting that view forward.

Research

The essay is filled with useful stuff, but lacks the scholarly literaturethat’s appropriate at this level of study. But that is something that will come with time if you make the commitment to it.

I do have a love hate relationship with the research at this time, I find it difficult to juggle the academic requirements alongside keeping reading fresh in my mind and often get bogged down over notarising texts. I do however feel that as the reading was mainly from the recommended reading list that I also struggled for what to read beyond that. Thankfully my tutor has recommended several titles and publications which are outside the realm of pure photographic reading which have helped with my development and practice of critical writing.

Reflection

Assignment 4 was for me my most challenging. The idea of putting personal opinion in writing seems to much more real that when blogging about a practical assignment where the focus appears to be more of the output rather than the text. I have no problems with putting out images but I feel that after several decades of working in public facing roles I have become so aware of potentially voicing opinions which conflict with the ‘image’ of the organisations I have worked for that I have essentially censored myself. the writing has definitely helped in refining that practice and given me the push to think and write more critically. I have enjoyed the process and the reading has sparked several ideas for future projects so I look forward to continuing the practice in further assignments and units. I do however feel I have been my own worst enemy in that my desire to push on through the unit has possibly not accounted for the additional work I need to do in areas such as this and with that push I haven’t fully embraced the more time consuming aspects of learning.