Joanne's Journal

Before I moved to London, I started to gain an interest in film photography. I attended a photography festival in Singapore last year and went to see one of my favourite photographer's exhibition, Nguan. I have known his work for a while now but never really got into film photography until I went to his exhibition last year. Seeing the pictures in real life felt different and I suddenly was intrigued by the medium.   Nguan's exhibition at the Singapore International Photography Festival (Nguan Singapore, 2018). Nguan's film camera on display (Nguan Singapore, 2018) His photos had this dream-like effect which was so mesmerizing which eventually sparked my interest in film photography. I bought a point-and-shoot film camera in Singapore in hopes to work on my photography skills and learn more about film when I moved to London. Before the start of the workshop, introduction to the different chemicals for developing our image When I found out there was a darkroom h...

Warburg Institute Visit On Tuesday (15th Oct), we went on a field trip to the Warburg Institute and Wellcome Collection. It was an eye-opening field trip as we got to view a library collection that was only open to post-graduate students. We were first introduced to the photo catalogue that they have in the building. Sadly, I did not manage to take any photos as I was listening to the librarian explaining the history of the Warburg Institute. He talked about the founder, Aby Warburg, who was crazy about collecting books about magic, science, philosophy, mythical gods, basically any subject that we would not have imagined. He explained to us that Warburg was so obsessed with collecting books to the point he created his own research library which was funded by his family. What intrigued me the most during that introduction session about the Warburg Institute was how the collections were catalogued. They were not catalogued according to alphabetical order but according to the dif...

Today I attended a blog writing workshop and we learnt several ways to improve our writing skills. We saw some examples of blog posts and analysed them. One of them was comparing two students' posts, and choosing which one is the better one in terms of how they reflected and analysed their project that they were writing about in their blog posts. Personally, I am not a very strong writer. Not that I'm bad at it, but there are times where I find difficulty articulating my thoughts into black and white. Looking and analysing the way these students wrote their posts gave me a better idea on how I can improve my writing. An activity that we did that helped create a structure when writing a blog post was to analyse a photograph taken by David Stewart called "Five Girls". In a group, we drew a huge mind map on what are the characteristics that we saw in the photo. Sadly, I forgot to take a picture of the mind map that we drew but some key characteristics that we pointe...

Over the course of this week, it was more hands-on. Some key things that I have learnt were Risograph printing and block printing. At the beginning of the week, I and a couple of friends went to the Risograph induction.   Dan introducing us to the risograph machine I went to the risograph induction because it was one of the printing methods that I wanted to use for my zine project. It was a very informative 45-minute induction session. We were taught how to use the machine, changing the masters and also how the colours would turn out when printed. We were also told that when you print using risograph, the ink never dries which is something that I have to take into consideration. Block printing was another way of printing that we did. Block printing session  It's a quick way to get different types of textures as print. We were given rollers, glass blocks and paint. During this whole session, we just explored what we could do with these materials. It was fun becaus...

I attended a workshop called Modeling (Interculture) Communication. At first, I had no idea what this workshop was for. I came in clueless. Most of my classmates thought it was some sort of modeling class. But it turns out it was about learning about how we communicate between different cultures. The course that I am currently studying is international. Which means everyone comes from different countries, different family backgrounds, different walks of life. There are lots of differences among us and therefore the purpose of this workshop to educate us on how we can better understand each other's differences and cultures. Using legos. First activity  For the first activity of the workshop, we were asked to build the tallest tower and it had to include a window with the legos that we have on our table. 5 minutes were on the clock. I pretty much went with the flow. I made sure that I had a strong foundation and slowly worked my way up. At the back of my mind, I knew had to...

When we were given the brief to head out of campus and collect objects I was intrigued. We were told that we are going to be brought on a walking tour around Elephant and Castle. However, the weather took a turn for the worst and it was raining. The tour still went on as normal. As we were walking around, I started taking pictures of random sceneries and objects. Not much thought was put into it. However, as we progressed on I started to find interest in the typography around London. The signages and billboards were kind of interesting to me. Coming from Singapore, there are definite differences between the typography design compared to London. In Singapore, most of our signage typography has a standard font and everything almost looks the same. However, here in London, there are various styles. I started to notice that during the walking tour. The images that I have collected over the course of the whole tour seemed a little meaningless at first, but after reading How to be...