Guest Speaker
We had an exciting talk with Emily Ryalls about her practice, her time as an educator and how her work alongside being a technician is thriving. A lot of Emily’s work is based around performance and self-portraiture, a blend of photography and documentary work. Emily’s work has looked at self-performance combined with film since her time at university, she explains that everything she captures is a performance for the camera. As she works with a medium format bronica 645, means that the process must be thought about before any image is taken. Her process of working really focused my own practice, while I am shooting digitally, the work I am making is done in a more cautious manner, by not going back and retaking if there’s not necessarily something I don’t like about the image.
Emily’s ideas of how to demonstrate her own artistic ideas, making powerful and impactful imagery are qualities of what I found most beneficial to my own work. Emily described her work to be able to ‘visualise the invisible’ which has sat with me while me making my own work. Visualising a story and making your own justifications on a piece of work is hard to communicate, therefore the advice that Emily gave us was so vital, as I found it a step where I had to understand my work more than just how I would be perceiving it.
Image Credited to Emily Ryalls