Research Process For Our Event

Brainstorming

Before we arrived at our final idea that we pitched to George, we went through a couple other ideas and naturally we hit a few roadblocks. we all love photography, so naturally that was our starting point and we were quite clear that our idea would incorporate photography one way or another. We were not sure though how we would respond to the photography focus area. There is a lot that one can do with photography – also, we understood that this was dangerous ground to tread on since George is a professional photographer. So, we knew that we were gonna be faced with a lot of research because whatever we were gonna do needed to be proper – we needed to get our story straight. The ideas we had before our final idea can be seen in the images and notes below. We played around with ideas such as a generic photography exhibition, an installation of photographs around campus in a scavenger hunt kind of manner, and an exhibition consisting of our own personal photographs. With all of the first few ideas we couldn’t quite agree on the theme and the dynamics of the whole thing. In addition to that, we didn’t feel that the ideas were good enough to impress us, George, and the audience. It was also hard to come up with something that would incorporate all the lessons that we needed to learn in organising an exhibition.

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Arriving at the final idea

We remembered that George speaks passionately about downtown Joburg, vernacular photography, and the recreation of practices and spaces that are significant in black culture and history. That is when I got the idea to pay tribute to the roaming and park photographers of the townships and the inner city. The group liked the idea as much as I did, and that’s when we settled with the idea to do an exhibition/event in ode to park and roaming photographers. We wanted to recreate the experience of getting a photograph taken by those photographers in that kind of environment. Not only that, but we also aimed to celebrate that history and also tell the stories of the photographers we were to interview and include in our research. This project is in response to the 2nd focus area and it would be conceptualised using the suggested books on photography by George – such as ‘Photography changes everything’. It also incorporates lessons and skills we learnt in focus area 3 about how museums and curators put together exhibitions.