PDP Module

Overall I feel like this module has helped me with the targets I had set and I will continue to stick to these targets and add more to them. This PDP module hasn't been my favourite but I understand how it will help me now and in the future, I am going to try and keep adding to my PDP for myself even after the module has finished. Even if photography isn't something I want to pursue straight after university I will defiantly be doing it in the future so I feel like keeping updated with my PDP will help me achieve this. 

Updated PDP

Development Target	Activities To Achieve Target	Support and Resources	Target Date/ Actual Date
Use The Library More and also learn how to research better. Using the library more will help me discover new ways of finding research.	Dedicate time to using the library more often and visiting galleries to help expand my knowledge of photographers and there work.	Borrow books more frequently, even if they are not needed at the time to help me learn more about different styles and practices. Also visit galleries and exhibitions more often.	January- June 2014
Expand On My Knowledge Of Editing Images by using software such as PhotoShop.	Use Adobe PhotoShop and Lightroom more to better and learn new skills that will be useful to me and my work, now and in the future.	Use the computer suite at University more and also try out new ways of editing that I wouldn’t have before by doing things that are completely new to me. Or strengthen my skills I already have.	January- June 2014
Photographers research photographers and their work.	Research more about photographers and broaden my knowledge of them and their work. Including work I would not usually look into.	Use the library and internet to research more about photographers and their work and also visit more galleries and exhibitions to view it.	January- June 2014
My Style choose what style of work I enjoy doing and feel that I’m best at.	Show research into what I enjoy doing and what my style of photography is.	Use the library more and maybe use the studio more often to show different kind of things I can do.	January- June 2014
Apply For Jobs Involving Photography start applying jobs that involve photography.	Show that I am applying for jobs that have some involvement in photography.	Look online for jobs that would be suitable for what I want to do.	December- June 2014

Photographers Research

A photographer I decided to research was Edward Weston. I really liked the style of his images and the angles he uses within them. I also like how you can't always tell what his work is a photo of which leaves you guessing.

These are just a selection of the kind of images he takes. I love the different shapes made and the contrast of the black and white. This is defiantly something that will influence my work.

Photographers Research

Another photographer I researched was Zed Nelson. The series I decided to research was 'Love Me'. This is what was said on his website about the series. 

'Love Me reflects on the cultural and commercial forces that drive a global obsession with youth and beauty.

Over a period of five years Zed Nelson visited 18 countries across five continents. The project explores how a new form of globalization is taking place, where an increasingly narrow Western beauty ideal is being exported around the world like a crude universal brand.'

We live in a society that celebrates and iconises youth, where the old, the aesthetically average and the fat seem to have been erased from the pages of our glossy magazines, advertising posters and television screens.

"However much we may confidently point the finger at certain industries, we can't deny our own tacit, albeit culturally conditioned, involvement. Like it or not, we are judged, and judge, by appearance. Perhaps we are obsessed with the way our own bodies look because we know how instinctively judgemental we are of the bodies that we look at."

"We have created a world in which there are enormous social, psychological and economic rewards and penalties attached to the way we look. Can any of us honestly say, 'I don't want to be attractive'? Don't we all want to be loved? But have we been brainwashed into believing that in order to be loved we need smaller noses, bigger breasts, tighter skin, longer legs, flatter stomachs and to appear ever youthful? Where does it end?

The body has, in a sense, become just another consumer purchase. Everyone can, in the spirit of our age, go shopping for bodily transformation. Banks now offer loans for plastic surgery. American families with annual incomes under $25,000 account for 30 per cent of all cosmetic surgery patients. Americans spend more each year on beauty than they do on education.

As our role models become ever younger and more idealised, we are so afraid of aging that the quest for youthful preservation generates an almost pathological obsession with our bodies. As we align our sense of self-worth with self-image, the psychological and emotional consequences are tortuous. The one thing we do know for certain is that our body will always, in the end, betray us."

I agree with all that Zed Nelson said in his intro that went with his series 'Love Me'. This subject is something a lot of people are interested in and will carry on being as more and more people become obsessed with beauty. 

These are just a selection of some of his images from the series. As you can see all these show different kind of beauty issues people have and how everyone thinks different things look beautiful therefore no one can become perfect in the eyes of everyone. So some people are fighting a losing battle. 

His work is very much about Body Image which a lot of my work is based around.

Photographers Research

Harold Edgerton is a photographer who's work I have followed and has inspired me since college. At one point I was very into shutter speeds and working with that so his work influenced me a lot at that point in my education.

His work will always be an influence towards my own.

Photographers Research

Another one of my favourite photographers is Francesca Woodman. I did a emulation project on her in my first year of university and fell in love with her work then.

I find her images so interesting and captivating. I also love how they are all self portraits.

These are the images I took of myself with influence from her work. 

Photographers Research

Lydia Goldblatt is the photographer who's images really influence my work. I love the way that she has took her images in a way where you feel like you are there. The series I decided to research into was 'Keeping Time'. This is the description of what keeping time is about that I found on her website... 

Keeping Time explores the transitional stage between childhood and adulthood, with its associations of vulnerability, awkwardness, emerging sexuality, uncertainty and competition. It focuses on young female ice skaters, exploring the emotional intensity of their physically demanding athletic experience as the blush and hue to adolescent change. Embracing the feeling of limbo, it enacts adolescence as a lingering period of waiting, a drifting, shifting time attendant on ‘becoming’.


The series traces a symbolic representation of adolescence and feminine identity, but equally embraces the hidden identity of the artist, and the subjectivity of the undefined viewer. Adolescent girls have long been a metaphor for the exploration of personal and social identity, and in this series they allow the artist to enact an autobiographical journey, albeit one that is filtered through imagination. Keeping Time explores memories, dreams and desires about what the past may have held, creating an ambiguous space of realistic illusion and illusory reality that references not only the personal memory of the artist but the elusion of memory itself. 


The images imply potential narratives that encourage the viewer to become an active participant in constructing meaning. Both physically and psychologically, they negate the individual identities of the sitters, creating a space of projection for both artist and viewer, such that the girls become metaphorical ‘alter-egos’.

Whilst the work scrutinizes the young female body, the sense of an interior existence, of psychological tension and the ravages of time reveal flashes of impending adulthood. In portraying adolescence thus, the series moulds an adult space in which to recall and consider our own identities, experience and potential.

I love the way the models are positioned, these images haven't been set up though she has