Project Development: Sequencing & Narrative

This week I’ve been thinking about the sequencing and narrative of the series, with the below my initial mockup of narrative sequencing, however I feel that upon seeing all the images together certain images need more tweaking in that the message I want them to convey is clearer in some than others. Figure 9 I feel might work better as an opener than an ending, especially in that the origins of censorship as we know it today was recorded in the Qin Dynasty burning Confucius’ work, and even since has lead to history repeating itself time and time again, with either the written word being censored or the entire individual. The latter, being particularly prevalent when it comes to women set on sharing their own views and experience, historically has lead to being labelled as a heretic, a witch and killed. Whilst today thankfully tends to not be a death sentence for a censored woman, the repercussions faced by women facing such censorship are usually worse than what men face in that the triggering point for censorsing is a much lower bar and the response tends to be more violent with graphic rape, dismemberment and death threats made as well as the usual attempts to silence the individual.

Figures 1 – 9 Murray, J. (2021) Work in Progress from the series ‘Heretic’

It became apparent looking at my sequencing that Figures 2, 5 and 9 needed tweaking in that they were either too weak and overpowered by the images preceding and suceeding. In the case of Figure 2 I think making the two frontal figures not glitch might greatly improve the image as the message held in the placard would be properly visible, as at the moment the image has far too much movement, Figure 5 has the opposite issue of being too still in comparison to images around it. As I still plan on shooting some additional images, it’s hard to say whether or not I will tweak the sequencing order more than moving Figure 9 and inserting the new images in. I have also been thinking on how I might display my work in a physical space, and currently my thoughts are on having a viewing experience where the sizes of the images on digital screens varies in scale like how the scale of the figures I’ve been using have varied, as well as making it impossible for the viewer to see more than one image at a time.

References

Figures

Figures 1 – 9 Murray, J. (2021) Work in Progress from the series ‘Heretic’.

Bibliography

Murray, J. (2021) PHO 705. Research & Project Development: Historical Censorship. [Online] Available from: https://jasmphotography.wordpress.com/2021/03/14/research-project-development-historical-censorship/ [19/06/2021]