Lecture week 4 - Research & Inspiritation

Audience:

Understanding the audience is possibly the most important part of your work when working for a client, or if you want your work to be well received by your audience. Understanding the audience properly can let you understand your own work and aim it at your audience to each tiny detail. You can focus your work into one point of detail and branch out to your audience from there. To understand your audience properly lots of research needs to go into finding out what they want from a piece of art work and what their likes and dislikes are in general. Finding out about their lifestyle, cultural background and the area they currently live in can influence their lifestyle choices. For example as fashion changes a person’s style can develop and change frequently but it may however not be how they would dress, they dress to fit the current trend. Whereas other people may feel comfortable in a certain way and will always dress like that as it what they know and feel comfortable in. this can be applied to art also as people tend to practice in one area and have one career choice instead of practicing in different areas. So when trying to understand an audience for a client it is important to find out how open minded they may or may not be or to try and focus in one area to a niche market that you know will love the piece.

Visual vocabulary

When making this RVJ I struggled trying to document my work as photographers don’t have that instant freedom to draw or sketch out a possible idea or piece like an illustrator or a graphic design may do. I realised that I had to make my own way or documenting my progress so I went about this by collecting images or text that may inspire me or that I found interesting and kept my possible ideas in my head so when I was out or looking I was always thinking of what I could put into the sketchbook to help me generate good and exciting ideas. Other photographers keep written diaries or journals to keep dreams or ideas fresh in their heads or to come back to refer at a later date. Looking at other photographers as part of my research allowed me to reference their work and then use or interpret it in my own work my in my own way. having a sketchbook or a notepad is a great way to help yourself make the development in your own visual vocabulary and enables you to be more productive in your practice as it gives you some motivation to practice you area. By experimenting in your area, for example my area is photography and I like to experiment with my practice in the darkroom as it can have an unpredictable outcome whether it is good or bad. I then will document this in a sketchbook or scan them into the computer, sometimes experiment with it more on Photoshop and upload to a blog, where you are able to choose to share your work with everyone or just still keep it to yourself.