A step sideways

I received an email from Photofushion in regard of their Salon 15 call for submissions the other day and have been thinking about what to submit. See here. So the decisions that needed making were

1. Should I submit?
2. If so what?
3. Theme my submission or not?
4. What type of production values should I use? Eg scale, borders?

As I have been working on portraiture and my body I felt that this would be a good area to think about for my submission. However I felt that as much of the specific project work in still uncompleted I would focus on this approach but in regard of my family rather than just me.

The submission guidelines advise that only one image will be selected but six may be submitted and so I did not need to concern myself with ensuring the form, style or scale of the images worked in relation to each other. I began by looking through recent images and sorting out those that said something about me or my family and picked these below.

The first four images seemed strongest to me because of their form. The last two, of dad and mum seemed to possess more of a narrative quality. But I like the range.

However I thought two of the photos needed boarders because their form required it.

On review I decided to remove the two images of mum and dad and allow the four with the strong resonant form be submitted. I know that only one would be selected (and then only if I am lucky) but felt that the submission hangs together better with the four. So here are the other two in larger format.

Project statement
The submission requires a project statement of up to 1500 characters and so here is mine.

Family Values/phenomenology
These photos are of Pete, his wife Karen and one of his sons – Alex. What do you see: form, aesthetics, evidence and documents? The photos are all of these things.   But don’t be mistaken into thinking that they can tell you a lot about what you can see within them as we all see through our own experience. Thus they say more about the photographer than anything else. Are these images windows to your worlds or mirrors of my own?

Pete Mansell took up photography as a serious activity in 2009. Since then he has studied the subject with the Open Collage of Arts and been awarded a first class honours degree by the University of the Creative Arts. He is currently just beginning the second year of an MA in Visual Arts: Fine Art Digital at Camberwell College of Arts.

Pete’s photographic interests and practice is heavily influenced by his relationship with the personal, social and physical world around him. This is coloured by the fact that he was paralysed at 20 years old and uses a wheelchair. Can you see this in the photos?

So now it’s just a case of wait and see whether any of the images strike a chord with the panel.  

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