For Task 3 of the #phonar course we were asked to pick one of Michael David Murphy UNphotographable and create a multimedia Narrative piece.

I chose; Sunday Morning Sun Shield

This is a picture I did not take of a woman waiting for a bus on a freezing morning in February, sun so bright in her face she shielded her eyes with a well-worn, black leather-bound Holy Bible.

I wanted to make a piece showing the writers journey that morning, I imagined him walking out his house, then glancing over the road to the woman at the bus stop and with a blink of his eyelids he captures this scene in his mind to describe later.

I underlined narrative in the first line, this is where I think my piece fails. I originally got video footage of walking along the street towards the bus stop. I planned to use to tell the story of his journey and how he encountered  this image, but the footage was poor, that bad it would have made a sailor sea sick.

There could be no 2nd shoot so my plans changed for the piece, I dropped the narritive in frames/stills and opted for just one still. Slowly zooming out to give the viewer a chance to see detail and then reveal the whole scene. My aim or hope, is for the viewer to form there own narrative in their mind whilst the picture is revealing itself. The difficult bit here was timing, a fast reveal would not give time for thought but to long would easily lose the viewers interest. I feel i may be a bit too close to the latter, as it is a picture of my daughter so it holds my attention easier.

For me, I’m happy with what I’ve produced, the Sunday Morning Sun Shield lends itself to a single image more so than a lot of Michaels other UNphotographable descriptions, which have action, movement and depth. What does facinate me is how his succint writing does stop the need for a image, yet it still makes my mind produce an image. This is a dichotomy, I think.