Hidden Project - November

For the 'hidden' project I kept an open mind about what I might end up with in the end. After trying out various experiments with hand drawn texts, overlapping, deconstructing and so on, I began to think more about what it was I wanted to 'hide'. I eventually came to consider hiding the audience itself and so the first medium of working that came to mind was photography. With a camera you have already established the viewpoint for the audience to assume so it was only a matter of constructing a sense of being hidden. Hiding myself with a camera in my hands was the first, quite obvious, method in which I attempted to get imagery. The shots from behind doors, underneath objects or inside cupboards were half of the way there.

I wanted something more atmospheric or cinematic - with the intention of making the audience both wonder what was happening in the image and get a feeling of being in a comfortable, hidden position. I managed to obtain this edge to the photographs by coming up with the idea of rolling a sheet of black card into a cone shape and inserting the camera lens into the wider end. This gave the photographs a completely black surface punctured only by a modestly sized, roughly circular shape which uncovered the scenery in front of the camera. This had satisfactory results but after playing with the shutter speed, while moving the cone at the same time, I managed to develop much more interesting results. I found that it was best to allow a small amount of bright light to enter the cone from the left or right while moving it round as the makeshift viewfinder of the camera. I also found I had to focus the camera on the subject before I covered it with the cone to avoid producing a blurred and meaningless photograph.

This project was, I would say, successful in that I managed to develop a working method as a solution to the brief which could be done time and again in different locations and the outcome will always be unpredictable. The amount of light, shutter speed, focus, zoom, and how fast the cone viewfinder is moved, all have a big effect on the final image. What I may have lacked in the project was the ability to work from start to finish in 3 weeks as in reality I had already begun to create the final images early in the second week. I wouldn't say this is a bad thing as long as the solution is a successful one and in today's world of graphic design I'm sure many clients are anxious to be given solutions earlier rather than later. Having tried other ways of communicating 'hidden' in week 2, and after finding there to be no other way in which to push my photographic method further, I submitted a series of photographs I found to be among the more interesting.