After submitting my last assignment for my OCA course, I received feedback from my tutor on a theoretical study that I wrote on Modernism. I had focused very much on American Modernist photographers and my tutor suggested that I may want to look at Modernism within European photography, suggesting the likes of Aleksandr Rodchenko. Taking this 'on board' I went to visit the Tate Modern exhibition, Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism.
The exhibition gave me a fascinating insight into the Constructivist movement and because it spanned the whole range of Rodchenko's work (as well as Liubov Popova and others, such as Varvara Stepanova (Rodchenko's wife)) it allowed me to place his photography into greater context; showing how his photographic ideas grew out of his experiments with painting/drawing, and his ideas on art, politics and the societal movements that were happening around him. I found his 'mechanical' ideals of artistic construction fascinating, allowing me to compare these constructions to some of the Gestalt theories of image construction/composition that I had studied within my first assignment for this course. Over the past few months I have found myself venturing into more creative, thought-provoking artistic pieces to explore ideas and concepts - mixing photographic media with drawing and other mixed media. This is an area that I will be exploring further; I have a documentary project in mind that will explore parental relationships with their children, which will be developed through photography, drawing, sound and poetry.
All in all, the exhibition allowed me to put an added dimension to the ideas that I had explored through the American Modernist photographers and has inspired me to challenge myself yet further into new areas of project development.
