Action Plan For Personal and Professional Development

Action Plan For Personal and Professional Development

As part of the natural progression of the course, it was required to complete a series of exercises in order to determine my personal strengths and deficiencies as they related to both my academic capabilities and my capabilities as a professional photographer. This sort of self-assessment was not alien to me as it was very similar to many of the methods of various courses and coaching I received whilst setting up my business a year and a half ago.

The first of these tasks was a series of computer-based exercises to acquire a visual representation of some of my strengths and weaknesses. This revealed, to an extent, much of what I was already aware.

My strengths included:

-         Guiding My Own Learning

-         Use of ICT

-         Writing and Analysis

-         Assertiveness

Whilst my weaknesses, as expected, included:

-         Time Management

-         Coping With Stress

There were also a few items of interest that fell into more of a grey area where I have “some of the required skills, but could still improve on”. These included:

-         Presenting Your Ideas

-         Research and Information Processing

Though not covered in these exercises, it is important for my own development and the resulting action plan to follow that I mention my awareness of the fact that my organisational skills are dire at best.

Having done these exercises, the next task was to evaluate my preferred “learning style”. An ideal result of this questionnaire would be an equal amount of answers directing towards each of the four learning styles: Activist, Pragmatist, Theorist and Reflector. Though I had never done anything of this sort before, I was fairly unsurprised to find that my learning style leaned heavily towards activist and reflector with a middle range value towards pragmatism and almost no emphasis on theorist.

Essentially, this means I am much more likely to jump into a task and ponder the outcome afterwards without trying to understand specifics or formulate a well thought out plan. Seeing this result on paper, I instantly recognised these traits in my day-to-day life and see how these “strengths” work for me on a daily basis.

However, acknowledging the obvious deficiency in the pragmatic and theoretic learning styles can help to understand my dilemma with time management and organisation even though I have been aware for years.

Subconsciously forgoing proper planning in favour of blind “activism” has clearly left me with no clear approach to the way I deal with tasks or my surrounding environment. Therefore, it is clear I must make a conscious effort in the future to apply these learning styles forcibly and make a real effort to overcome my weaknesses in this area.

To help with this, I have procured several generic time management sheets and “to do” list sheets as used by my local council. By filling these in at the beginning of any given week, my time should be sufficiently allotted to conquer anything I might be required to do. Furthermore, by ensuring that I give appropriate time to organise all of my goings on and assets on a regular basis, I should be able to significantly improve my organisational skills in no time. To supplement this, online resources such as “Lifehacker” and “Zen Habits” will provide to be regular sources of information on both of these main weaknesses and I will strive to apply techniques from theses sources and others in my daily routine to fix my problem areas.

Regarding “Professional Development” specifically, I am well aware that I have been on a plateau with my capabilities for a while. To combat this and further my technical and creative competencies, I will endeavour to ensure that I attempt to learn at least one new camera or lighting technique and one new retouching technique per week. This, as a bare minimum, should provide me to constantly “infuse” my work with a breath of fresh air and help me to further vary my portfolio in the interest of various types of prospective clients.

Out Of The Ordinary / Extraordinary: Japanese Contemporary Photography

Out Of The Ordinary / Extraordinary: Japanese Contemporary Photography

When I first heard that there was to be an exhibition of contemporary Japanese photography staged at the Civic in Barnsley, I felt a mixture of excitement and trepidation. The very prospect of combining my passion for photography with the many intricate facets of modern Japanese culture, of which I gleefully experienced first hand whilst living on Okinawa for three and a half years, was enough to leave me figuratively salivating. However, the words contemporary photography in “fine art” environs were enough to negate that excitement as my experiences with this sort of photography usually left a sour taste in my mouth.

In the past, I have found that photography that falls in the contemporary art genre relies on a certain aesthetic, often bleak, gloomy and unrefined; and is usually tenuous at best conceptually. This is in sharp contrast to my personal preferences towards the glossy, highly polished images used in high-end advertising. To illustrate this point, it might even be worth noting that the only photography book of dozens I own that has gone almost completely unread is “The Photograph As Contemporary Art” by Charlotte Cotton as the tedium of the content, in relation to my tastes, left me largely un-stimulated. 

However, in execution, the exhibition itself proved to be the antithesis to both of my estimated possibilities.

“Out of the Ordinary / Extraordinary: Japanese Contemporary Photography” featured the work of eleven Japanese fine art photographers in an immaculate gallery setting.

Immediately upon entering the gallery, you were drawn to a series of A1 prints on the far wall. At first glimpse, you could have been forgiven for automatically assuming the series “In My Room” by Takano Ryudai was the typical contemporary art fare of which I referred negatively to above. A closer inspection; however, revealed something more intricate. Whilst the portraits portrayed bare posteriors, naked lower bodies with trousers at the ankle and the expected gloomy expressions, these shock tactics soon gave way to what I perceived as what may have possibly been unintentional satire. It quickly became clear that these were actually “fashion” images of a sort. All of the images in the series were photographed on a plain white background with the floor being either wooden boards or laminate. This aesthetic is not one that normally conjures images of Eastern culture. To further add to this, none of the wardrobe on display in the photographs was remotely Japanese in origin. Blue jeans, denim shirts and black stockings and garters, to name a few, all seem to point to the point that these are all Western stylings. I, of course, may be entirely off the mark with this supposition and I may indeed be drawing from my own experiences of a small Japanese prefecture that plays host to no fewer than 50,000 foreign troops, but in my mind’s eye that seems to be the most obvious intent. The ultimate result of this left me with much higher hopes for the rest of the exhibition and I am of the opinion that this particular artist flawlessly achieved an aesthetic similar to that of Terry Richardson’s much lauded and simultaneously, much ridiculed work.

With my prefabricated expectations dissolved, I devoured the rest of the exhibition. It was obvious that the Japan Foundation went to great lengths to choose extremely varied and equally eclectic bodies of work for this exhibition. From a mixed media installation involving the concept of pregnant men by Okada Hiroko, to a much more intimate study of personal objects in Ishiuchi Miyako’s “Mother” to the satirically scathing approach to social commentary in Sawada Tomoko’s series of self-portraits: “Cover” and “OMAI”.

Finally, I feel it’s important to point out a concept much more subtly illustrated in this exhibition. I, personally, find a lot of people either forget or misunderstand the magnitude of the fact that Japan is the only post-apocalyptic society on the planet. Even while living on Okinawa, which is hundreds of miles from Hiroshima and Nagasaki on mainland Japan, it was impossible to escape that this very fact is a very large part of modern Japanese culture. Everything from films, to television, to comics seem to more often than not result in some cataclysmic climax. I fully expected to see this in translation at some point in the exhibition.

Though possibly more conceptually related than literally, Yoneda Tomoko’s three images of a B-52 bomber, miniscule in relation to the sky, returning from a bombing run in Iraq easily conjure, in my mind at least, images of similar sorties in 1945 over mainland Japan.

In the end, this exhibition managed to shatter my preconceptions of contemporary fine art photography as each installation was brimming with conceptual brilliance and technical finesse. If nothing else, it reinforced to me the importance of subtlety in some instances when conveying a message in order to maintain interest in the viewer. It also helped to show that images can have shock factor to garner attention, but then have subtler messages underlying to convey the artists’ true intent.