This month has been a time for writing and for reflection. I have been working on my literature review and combining this with my dissertation proposal. As I was doing this I was struck by several thoughts.

• My proposal is perhaps a little broad, but next year I will have time to refine not just the scope of my written work but also my thoughts and learning around my area of interest next year.
• My next thought is maybe basic and obvious, but it occurred to me that my literature review was all about writing. My sources produced written works to express their sense of loss and grief and their reactions to death and the photograph. I then reviewed these written works. As an example, my studies revealed lots about Susan Sontag and her experiences with TB and cancer and, importantly, the experiences of those close to her. One that interested me was the tension between Sontag’s partner, Annie Liebovitz and Sontag’s son, David Rieff and especially around the photographs Liebovitz took of Sontag when she was suffering and after she had died. I have drawn comparisons between the written word and photography when used to create a sense of memory of the dead in my essay but feel that this photographic representation of loss, grief and death and the conflict that arises from such photographs is worth studying in much more depth.

My time on this unit has been a journey. An educational journey, picking a path through my interests with a growing sense of what I have found out and all that I don’t know. It has also been an emotional journey, trying to understand my own sense of loss and grief and to find a way to express myself and to bring emotions into the open rather than internalising them. I don’t know how much my sense of this journey exists for my tutor too. I am thinking about my audience here. The tutor is the closest and most aware of my work so sits at the front of the auditorium. Tutors and also assessors deal with many students and projects so I wonder if the sense of my own educational and emotional journey is just words or if it creates any sense of resonance? This goes back to my thoughts on words and images and for that matter the physical objects described by Batchen. How do I create and express my sense of what my art says and means to me and convey this to someone else? I have previously expressed disatisfaction in some of my creative works as I find they don’t always generate the emotional tug but at the same time such thoughts are part of my own internal battle which forms part of my practice when working in the field of the deaths of children and of cancer and how we remember our dead. I feel I can express my thoughts in words. Can I get close to these thoughts through the photograph?