I’ve set up this site to collect the various things I am producing as I work my way through the final stages of the Open College of Arts’ Bachelor’s Degree in Photography. Eventually (I hope) it will consist of three sets of posts, one for each of the three level three modules: 3.1 – Practice and Research, 3.2 – Context and Audience and 3.3 – Major Project.
As the second and third modules are designed to build on the work done for the preceding one, I’ll not be creating separate logs for each one, although I will split them off into separate categories to keep things more obviously distinct from each other.
You will be able to see everything in standard, blogging reverse-chronological order by clicking on the chirgwin – third at the top left or you can access my work module by module, by using the pink navigation menu at the top right of this WordPress window.
As for me, I am straight, white and male; I am middle class and wear glasses. I am comfortable with computers and can usually get them to do what I want them to do. I have worked, pretty much continuously, in a variety of roles – some creative, some less so – in the broadcasting industry since I graduated from the University of Glasgow with a degree in English Literature and Film & Television Studies in the mid nineteen-eighties. That seems an awfully long time ago.
I grew up in Orkney and now live in London with my partner and ten year-old daughter. I have a twenty year-old son who has just moved out of his mother’s house in Glasgow to live in a flat of his own.
When I was ten, I was given a Kodak Instamatic camera and have been taking photographs ever since. I learnt how to process black and white film in my teens, but really started taking what I was doing seriously after buying a digital point and shoot at the airport on my way to Moscow for work. A couple of years after that, Flickr proved a revelation and set me on a course of increasingly systematic photographic (self-)discovery which led me to start studies with the Open College of the Arts, shortly after my fiftieth birthday.
The posts that precede this one summarise my time so far with the OCA, but if you’d like more detail, my earlier blogs are here:
- Landscape, Place and Environment (October 2020 – September 2022)
- Digital Image and Culture (October 2018 – October 2020)
- Identity and Place (April 2017 – September 2018)
- Context and Narrative (August 2015 – May 2017)
- The Art of Photography (April 2014 – September 2015)
chirgwin - third 