Assignment Three - some comparisons

I mentioned, responding to the comments on my last post here, that I had produced a slideshow video version of the Paris Photo images.  Actually, I have also done two 'in the style of' magazine layouts of selected images as well; and I'm also printing a small selection.  It is interesting and worthwhile, I think, to consider all these different forms in which the images might be used.

Starting out with the slideshow video:

This has a very different 'feel' compared with the short movie in the previous post, even though many of the actual images are common to both. The pace is slow, steady and even; there is just about enough time to consider each image in its own right; but there is some degree of flow and structure as well; whilst the selection and ordering is down to me, the artist, there is probably enough 'space' for the viewer to form some of his/her own opinion about the event and the images.  It has no soundtrack, of course, and including one would have made a significant difference - another 'cool' jazz track would fit well, but what if the background had been sounds from Leeds market!

This assignment comes at the end of a section of the course entitles 'Photography in Publishing II'; and many of the exercises leading up to it seem directed towards photo-journalism and the use of images in printed publications.  (Though, to be fair, 'A story in pictures' is a concept open to many interpretations.)  I chose to use some of the images from Paris Photo as the basis for an exercise around page layouts and considered two magazine styles that might have had a feature on the subject.  The first, below (each image being a double page), is 'in the style of' a colour supplement magazine such as the Sunday Times.

Four double-page spreads is probably a bit unlikely, but I have based the style on some research of relevant publications - almost always starting with a full bleed image on the title page; almost always including centrally-positioned image across two pages, as in the second spread above; and very often ending with a half-page image after the 'sign-off'.  Clearly, the overall impact of the 'story' will depend on the words, but despite my overall disatisfaction with the photographs I brought back from Paris, a small selection, such as these, has enough variety of subject, framing and style to support an article such as this.

The other type of publication I had in mind was the professional photography journals.  Of course, many of these tend to concentrate on images as art rather than as supporting material for reportage.  But I did work around the idea of an article in the British Journal of Photography, perhaps as a report in their 'Intelligence' section.  They actually tend to go for very 'simple' layouts and so I produced this:

As I said above, I have also done prints of a small selection, but I keep tending back to the view that I haven't really produced any images that stand up strongly on their own.  Since this section and this assignment is, to an extent, aimed at producing a 'story in pictures', I could conclude that I've 'failed', but I would probably be being a bit unfair on myself.  The selection and layout in the 'colour supplement' style above, for example, could probably do enough to inform a casual reader of the magazine, even if they didn't choose to read the article.  (The images themselves would be captioned too, of course.)

I now need to decide on just what I'll submit to my tutor.  Since the various options are here in my Learning Log, I'm tending towards just submitting the video, since that is the one that satisfies the brief to present my take on the event in a manner that challenges and stretches me from the technical point of view.