Guest lecture Rachel Brown
I first heard of Rachel Brown a photographer in a online guest lecture at the University of Huddersfield, Rachel gave a talk on her personal practice, I could not keep my eye of the screen or stop listen, I was memorised by her work and the way she spoke about it, I was hooked. A few weeks later after this talk Rachel came back to talk to a group of students, I was lucky enough to be one of them students as my pod was picked. Before going on to the call I was really nervous about showing my work, this soon changed as she was really nice and made you feel relaxed. Towards the end of our studies we got the opportunity to speak to Rachel one-to-one I was lucky enough to grab a slot, this went really well again she loved how I had taken my project forward and the fact I had gone to the root to conceal Katie’s identity in the project and the way I had gone about this is a creative way. Rachel also went on to say that she loved the Images of the casted hands that it was like “a moment in time”, that Katie’s hand had so much personality, that is looked at the perceived idea of ‘beauty’. Rachel moved on to say it was a respectful and clever idea whilst taking about my project and as we only had a 15 minutes time slot and was near the end and we still had more to talk about she ask me to sign up for the one-to-one portfolio reviews she was doing the week after as she wanted to see me again. Going into see Rachel again I knew I had a few questions I wanted to ask, this was about how to narrow down images for sequencing?, what would be the best number for a book? etc. Rachel said that she would do the book portrait and would take the images out of my niece and nephew, as their identity was not hidden and would maybe look to a viewer that you were hiding Katie’s identity because she was disabled, this was something I had not of thought of. Over all of my feedback Rachel was very complementary of my work, which made me feel great and that I was going down the right path. Rachel really helped me with my development and narrow down which images I did and did not need, she also helped me with the new title of my project which is now named ‘Katie’ and the front cover which along with other feedback was one of her favourite images, this was the one with the casted hands. To get feedback from such a talent photographer and for her to like my work was a great feeling and was one of the mains things that stood out to me over the course of this academic years.
Siobhan :)
29/04/21
