The OCA Photography Scotland group I am a part of has been running for a few years now. We used to meet in person, arranging gallery visits in Glasgow or Edinburgh or attending study days usually through in Glasgow. The group has a majority background from photography at different stages in their studies with a photography tutor attending our sessions. Although called OCA Photography Scotland, we attract members from the North of England and also students from disciplines other than photography which provided an interesting balance to our visits and meetings. Since Covid with all of the lockdowns, our meetings been in the form of a Zoom chat and are no longer tutor led. We a strange hybrid group which cross the narrow boundaries of OCA’s idea of regional groups but what we have has always seemed to work well for us, maybe in part due to the diverse geography of where we live allied to the limited pool of active OCA members to draw upon.

The Zoom chats take place monthly and involve disussing a chosen image or artwork, discussing what we are working on and any relevant issues that are on our minds.

12th May

The group spent most of today’s meeting discussion one another’s work and projects, and where we are in our respective studies.

Caroline spoke of her project about a journey and spoke of hitchhiking and mentioned US man Jacob Holt who been hitchiking round USA for more than 5 years. I mentioned that my own project for that section of Landscape was more of a journey through time by a relative. Will be interesting to see what work she produces.

Neil spoke abut time-lapse photography and still images around the sea shore and river estuary on a project about rising water levels and the envioronment. One thing that caught my imagination was him desribing working with textile student who wanted t explore a water soluble material. This idea of decay through water and perhaps immitating decay through time is of interest to me.

We touched on idea of algoritithms and fractals which interests me and John found a link to a paper by Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz and Aristid Lindenmayer on the algorithmic beauty of plants. Will be interesting to look at this with one eye on the idea of plants and flowers used in death symbolism.

John has finished level 1 and ready to start level 2 but held off as he been moving house.

We then finished call by chatting about this month’s image nominated by Neil, a series by John Londei called Shutting Up Shop and specifically an image called Toy Shop from 1982. Londei took his series of images of shops looking for examples full of character and photographng them with their owners either from the inside or outside. He returned to his project some years later to find most of the shops were gone so was able to photograph a before and after series exploring how our society has changed and so many shops which been open for a lifetime now gone.

The example below is a photograph of a toy shop in Boscomb which was thought of as being a kind of Noah’s Ark. I think it interesting to consider the sense of the past and of a ‘longing’ for that past that is ‘better than today’ often thought of by the idea of wearing rose tinted specs. Showing what is but is about to change forever. A picture of the moment it was made but at same time almost from another world.  A very interesting series that made me think about how the past is shown and thought of.

 

14th April

This was our first meeting where we had shifted to use the OCA Student Association web site. Previously we posted details of our meetings on the OCA forum and in a Facebook group. Not overly confident with the OCASA interaction as doesn’t seem to lay out posts or meeting details in a logical way. I have no idea why OCA seem to overcomplicate things such as this (which echoes what been seen in Photography 3.1). Maybe this is just in the nature of big organisations that they don’t tend to be nimble.

This was the image up for discussion as chosen by Zoe but sadly due to mixup on meeting numbers I didn’t manage to dial in this month.

 

 

 

 

 

 

9th March

This month’s image was chosen by Caroline.

 

 

 

Moriyama is a Japanese photographer, from a graphic design background before shifting to photography. His grainy, high contrast, almost severe images was a good choice as were lots of different opinions and ideas expressed about his work. Interesting that Moriyama chooses photo books to show his work and has produced over 150 of these.

After discussing Moriyama meeting went onto chat about problems being encountered with one student with work, home life and her course making demands on her time.  Group as is usual attempted to offer support and ideas and chat spread out to what others working on

9th February

The piece for discussion was a series called Indigo Dust by Miriam Levi. Her work can be seen at this link – https://www.miriamlevi.com/indigo-dust#1

Levi graduated from Napier University in 2021 and is based in Edinburgh. Her focus is on alternative processes and cameraless techniques and uses digital software.

I was very interested as Levi has produced some images reusing medical images in this series. I eenjoyed looking at her work and considering the techniques she using and trying to work out what she us trying to convey through her work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition to Levi’s work, we chatted over many things from our different studies, to commencing a new course and submissions for assessment. As one of students commented afterwards, “these meet-ups are a real motivational booster and extremely supportive”.