The reason I named it as I did was because, having posted all the photographs, I wondered where to go from there!
When I decided upon my topic for the major project of this Course I chose "Peculiar Britain" in which I planned to look at the variety of costumes worn by groups such as re-enactment Societies or Morris Dancers. The more images I took and the more I thought about the whole subject I came to realise that although the aforementioned groups were 'obvious' examples of costume wearing it was true to say that we all wear costumes that reflect not only our own view of ourselves but also how we wish to be seen by the rest of the world. In part this is a natural desire within human beings to be seen as belonging to a group whether in terms of uniform such as police officers wear or a wide, possibly an amorphous, group where membership maybe ill defined and constantly changing such as 'youth of today'. My initial thoughts was to present a series of images that showed the differing costumes both obvious and less obvious.
It was in response that I re-considered this plan when my Tutor in his response to my Assignment 4 submission suggested that there would be value in juxtaposing images that would offer food for thought and invite a greater and more studied reaction by the viewer. By this time I was well into my project but the opportunities were there to present the images in a different way. I was now faced with choices about what images overall I wished to include and the combination/sequence of the chosen images within the final form of presentation that was going to be a book. Over a period of months I had taken well over 500 images and had selected the 'best' ones from each shoot but this still left me with a large number of possibles from which to make the final selection including those that I had submitted as part of earlier assignments..
I tackled this problem initially by reviewing all the images on the computer and at the same time identifying those that would be provide pairings or groupings that would meet the criteria I was now using for the final work. I decided that I would make 10 x 8 prints (or close approximations) of the chosen images as I felt that this would offer the best way of placing the images in some sort of coherent order. This initial sift highlighted some gaps either because there was a lack of relevant images or because the aspect of individual images were at odds with the others I wished to place with them. I had, therefore, to go out and take more images but this time with a specific aim in mind. By the end of this process I had some 90 to 100 prints that needed further sorting.
I had no real idea of what the best method was to best meet the challenge but I was reading Bill Jay and David Hurn's book "On being a Photographer" in which they talked of pin boards. Here is an example of where sometimes our obsession with modern technology blinds us to the tried and tested methods of the pre-digital world. The Wonder Wall was the outcome.
There are, I think, 57 images on the wall and I sorted them by starting with those I knew for certain how to use and ending up with those that, at the time of writing, did not fit naturally into the scheme of things. It was whilst I was carrying out this exercise that I discovered that I have a strong tendency to take portraits with the figure on the right hand side looking in towards the centre of the image. As I understand the consensus of opinion figures should be looking in to the centre of two pages in a book so that I had a predominance of right page figures and a dearth of left page figures. Fortunately there were sufficient images to be able to flip horizontally without obvious consequences such as lettering within the image becoming mirror writing. Lesson learnt - be aware of where you wish to end up before setting out on the road.
At this stage I now need to examine each chosen print to ensure that the final resulting print will be acceptable. I have retained all the original RAW images so that I can, where necessary, go back and eradicate any problems.
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