The Sketchbook
- For each unit, you are required to complete a Sketch book. A successful sketchbook will record: thought processes; technical and formal experimentation; research and responses to photographers, artists, texts and other sources; and evaluations of resolved pieces, clearly relating the work of other artists/photographers and designers to your own work.
A Photography sketchbook does not need to be planned, designed or decorated.
Avoid fancy titles or colouring pages, etc., unless this is part of the work. Instead, allow the book to develop organically, following your lines of enquiry and the evolution of your research.
It can certainly be scruffy and scuffed, indeed, it will be, if you take it everywhere and it becomes integral to your daily existence.
Avoid layering and folding images, you should be able to leaf through a sketchbook easily and allow things to catch the eye.
Try to find relationships between the work of other photographers and your own.
Annotations are important but also try to create visual relationships wherever possible; reflecting on the relationships between images. The way you place images in relation to each other to suggest connections is known as juxtaposition. These can be art images and/or images from popular culture, whatever is of interest for you.
Do not censor/deselect work in sketchbooks, leave everything in. What you may deem to be of no interest may be of great interest, a teacher may be able to pick up on lines of enquiry you hadn’t perhaps considered.
The idea is that your sketchbook becomes indispensable, you take it everywhere and jot down observations, thoughts, ideas and sketches wherever you go.