Exhibition Debenham Suffolk

Visited an exhibition by a fellow student today. There were two other OCA students from the OCA there as well. It was most valuable.


The exhibition was entitled The City of Debenham and was a very clever combination within each print of shots from the village and of the very modern buildings in the capital of Kazakhstan. The producer of these montages gave a full and clear explanation of how he had produced the work and the thinking behind the project. It was his major submission for Photography3 Advanced which he has almost completed. What struck me was the huge amount of effort he had put in to do such things as 'cutting out' unwanted material from the many images he had used so that the various elements worked together. I had assumed that he had used some sort of masking software but when questioned he stated that he had used the eraser tool and then blurred the edges to make the joining elements seem to fit together. He had been impressively successful. One could but admire his patience and effort in completing such a task.

Of course the question has to be asked - "How successful was the outcome?" I have to admit to an essentially negative reaction on first viewing because I had taken the conscious decision not to read the caption card that accompanied each photograph. It followed that I could make little sense of what I was seeing. The juxtaposition of the very modern architecture of the capital city and the more ancient village architecture jarred and I found it almost impossible to make sense of what I was seeing. I succumbed to the siren call of the caption cards fairly quickly and at least I began to understand what was being presented. I still felt uncomfortable as I tried to take a view on what I was seeing. We had been asked by the author to tell him what we thought and whilst I recognised the considerable skill shown, both in the taking of the images and the way that the combined images were exhibited, I remain unconvinced that it had worked.

The exhibitor then gave us a short talk on each individual image and it was at this point that I realised what was bothering me - it was the relationship between the various buildings. In one image we are presented with a side view of the local parish church which is a large outstanding building with much to commend it. The other part of the image was a mosque complete with minarets whose size did not seem right. In talking later to the author he revealed that it was his intention to show the mosque as being some distance from the church and therefore would necessarily appear smaller. There were similar instances in some of the other images. What I believed to be wrong was the perspective within the images. Perspective and differing focus gives us clues as to how buildings are related in the two dimensional world of the photograph. In all cases the focus was equally sharp so that we received no clue and perspective lines did not exist .

Interestingly I had just completed a project in Photography3 Your own portfolio on 'separation' within an image so I was probably more than usually sensitive to these elements.

I raised this with the author but I have to admit that I could not think of a way to ensure that perspective could be incorporated in the images although I know that there is, within Photoshop, the ability to use it. In Edit >Transform there is the option to use Perspective'. There is also a Perspective Crop tool within the Tool Box but as I have never used either I did not feel able to suggest what could be done.

In summary I was full of admiration for the quality of the individual images used in the montages and awed by the patience and dedication shown in the creation of each finished image. However I feel that the final results would have been even more realistic if greater attention had been given to how the various buildings related to each other within each individual image. The metamorphosis of Debenham as a village to becoming the new capital of the United Kingdom would have been even more believable.