Anyways, I have a crazy-cool teacher (I guess they're really called tutors but what the hell...). He is by all means not afraid of using strong language. I can illustrate this with this one situation where he approached me when I was scanning some photographs with my lovely girlfriend at my side. I asked him how he was, and introduced my girlfriend. He said:
"That can't be your girlfriend! You're too fucking ugly to have a girlfriend"
I must admit to being slightly at loss for anything to say at that point, so he continued without any intervention.
"If you have a girlfriend everyone in the world should have one. Everyone's better looking than you!"
I think that I had been there about a week at that time, and while I'd already understood that this was the way this guy was, I'm not too sure that my girlfriend had the same intel. I think she was slightly shocked actually.
Upon another occasion this same teacher was mistaken for another teacher by some students that'd never been in our department before. They were returning some photo-equipment. And when they asked him whether he was indeed Niall (he isn't), he answered the following:
"What?! Dipstick! Are you on drugs?"
"No, I'm not. I just thought you might me Niall"
"I'm not... Sure you're not on drugs?!"
And speaking of which, we had a situation in one seminar, where one of the students (Matt) kept falling asleep. First time this wonderful teacher of mine noticed it, he merely asked him whether he was alright. Matt had allegedly been working so much with his project that he didn't go to sleep until early in the morning (no way I was buying that). Still, we continued. The second time it happened my teacher had this to offer:
"You should take some drugs! That will help you.. Cocaine should do the trick. Or amphetamine... Yeah, amphetamine sulphate, that used to be the shit..."
He went on a bit like that. I don't think it would be an overstatement to say that just about all of us thought we had fallen asleep as well.. This had to be the thing of weird dreams. No such luck.
Well enough about him for now. We've had three projects.
The (somewhat unexpected) summer project was to consider the notion of space in areas around you or in connection to some words (or something like that).
I chose to look at Urban Space and Mindscape.
Second project was called Time Sequence Memory, mine was called "the Journey".
Third was called Transposition and Transformation, where we were supposed to reference some other artists work. I referenced my favourite photographer, Tommy Oshima's "Graffoto" series. These consist of pictures on a wall. I went out and found street art, took pictures of it and put these on a wall making my own street art. Took pictures of these again with a large format camera. Cool stuff.
The one we have now is a Self Initiated Project. And this is twice as long as the others (four, not two weeks). I'm presenting next week, think I'm done taking pictures actually.
Other than my pictures, I'm expected to present research. My problem is that I don't think I really do research. I'm not really sure what they mean by that. What I've picked up is that the idea is as important (if not more) as the actual pictures. This is slightly problematic for me as I usually do street photography. Obviously it's challenging to have a specific idea and get random people to make it happen. I do conscious choices, but I have a hard time explaining them. I'll try some other time. Anyways I'm supposed to look at other photographers, I do this ALL THE TIME, I'm a flickr-addict. But they want me to take notes and do bad prints of everything I look at and stick them in a beat-up book together with a bunch of writing about the idea. I'm just not that type of guy... enough about that.
I realize that if I intend for anyone to actually read through this, I need to write less.. I'm stopping here.
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