Having had both sessions on my images and with a great amount of feedback and a clearer view of which images were effective and which were less so. From the previous projection session, most of the identified strengths and weaknesses mostly carried through into the group crit session, meaning that I wasn’t faced with polar opposite opinions on pieces that might make this process far more difficult.
As identified in that previous session, I felt the best way to sort out the images would be splitting them into three groups, yes, maybe, and no. Images that ended up in the yes category mostly comprised ones that had a good mix of elements coming through the blending process, desirable artifact-type effects from the mixing of various grayscales, and visually striking overall compositions that invited questions and formed complex arrangements. The images that were the trickiest to place into this category or the maybe category were images that featured very similar themes or even assets/compositional similarities and this then became a matter of choosing a better of the two, or rarely three, images to put through to the yes category with the remainder going into the maybe category where it might still be useful as enlarged textural assets for use on leaf pages or for a cover image for the book.
As mentioned, the images ending up in the maybe were those that either fell too close to existing, stronger images and would cause an unwanted sense of repetition or even dilution of the tone. The others that ended up in this category were those that felt too heavy and didn’t leave enough room for open reading and individual interpretation of the work, these were the images that would most likely become the aforementioned enlarged assets used for detailing or the cover of the book.
Those ending up in the no category were those that I felt either didn’t say much at all through their form, those that felt too loose in their composition, those that felt very much like outliers to the rest of the set and just didn’t ‘fit’ with their counterparts. Thankfully there wasn’t a tremendous amount of no’s and those that were there definitely felt as if they belonged there so there wasn’t much sense of disappointment or loss at some of the work at this stage. Interestingly the main body of the no category was made up of images from the first sessions of making the images, this to me showed that at that stage I was still somewhat unsure myself of the method and where and how to use it effectively. I was pleased then that I was able to see myself the progression of the work as I made them and became more sure of myself and that the process I was developing was in fact developing and producing interesting work as it became more realised.
In the end, I was left with 22 out of the original 40 in the yes zone, this fit into my plan of between 20 and 25 images and would provide around 50 pages of the book making a decently readable book, with a concise expression if its ideas and work without being either too bulky and a mission to read or too light and not covering the project enough to give the reader a rounded sense of what the book is about and what it is trying to say.
(Cropped, click for full view)
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