Why Me, Why This Course

I thought I might share my application form for joining the Advanced Practice: Photography course - I 

might regret this but here you go: 

Advanced Practice - Student Profile

This is to help us create an individual learning experience for you. It will also help you gain a greater

understanding of areas where you would like to improve your skills and knowledge.

Description of yourself:

Getting on in life, over the last fifteen years or so I have experienced a passion for art and

photography that has been new and exciting to me. I had some love for photography in my late teens

and early twenties but I lost sight of it and did other things until an encounter with the first digital

camera I had seen at a NYE party about 15 [20??] years ago or so sent me off in search of a camera for

myself. Since then I have explored photography pretty much continuously, occasionally becoming

disillusioned for short periods but always coming back to it, and to art in general, and to a need to

explore and take photographs whenever I can. I have a website at

https://www.patrickdoddsphotography-arts.com/

(which, as I mentioned, needs updating). I used to have a wedding-photography based website but I

haven’t kept this up and I no longer have a desire to photograph weddings, though I believe there are

some tremendous wedding photographers out there, notably Jeff Ascough whose work I have long

admired. I also have an instagram account https://www.instagram.com/patrickdodds/ but i haven’t

uploaded to it for some time, pretty much since Instagram became a sort of TikTok wannabe.

I currently work four days a week (M/T/W/T) at a children’s hospital in London;

weekends I sometimes have the odd paid photography job and I would like to get more paid work,

though I suspect that, had I paid work every weekend, I might find this a bit soul-destroying: I like to

photograph people but I am quite introverted so doing so takes it out of me emotionally /

psychologically. I also travel to Hay-on-Wye in Wales most weekends.

I shoot using digital cameras pretty much exclusively...

I don’t draw or paint but would like to, though in truth there is little enough time left for me to learn

photography and printing, let alone whole new skill sets such as these. That said, I am interested in

combining photographs and paint but have yet to produce anything worthwhile using these, though I

keep thinking about it a lot - I need to do more, think less… As I said above, I mainly like to

photograph people (actors are particularly obliging and interesting, but creatives in general are people

I like to work with - in my experience they are more open and willing to experiment than most), though

going out alone with a camera is always something I enjoy.

For the last ten years or so I have kept a habit of Morning Pages (3 hand-written A4 pages, written out

stream-of-conciousness style every morning), a habit that I picked up having followed The Artist’s

Way (a book / set of exercises / kind of 12 steps for artists written by an American called Julia Cameron)

 in 2013 or thereabouts. I also print out the occasional photograph to stick in these, sometimes writing or 

painting on them. I write about photography and art a lot in these pages and love the habit I have got into -

some coffee and the pages are like little patches of freedom between the cages I otherwise must inhabit in 

my life in order to survive. I wish I read more but find I spend too long on the internet instead; when I do 

read it is often books about art. Similarly, I spend a fair bit of time in the evenings watching or listening to

videos about art and / or photography.

Photographers I like / admire include Sally Mann, Richard Avedon, Paolo Roversi, Sarah Moon, Keith

Carter, Jack Davison, Saul Leiter, Gregory Crewdson, Trent Parke… A Sally Mann exhibition, and the

Klein / Moriyama at Tate Modern, have both been important photographic exhibitions in my life, whilst

Klimt, Schiele, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Holbein, Picasso, Ingres, Soutine and Dorothea Tanning are

just some of the artists whose work I love and admire.

What would you like to achieve from this course?

There are a few things I’d be interested in getting from the course, though the overriding one would be

to have some time to think about photography, it’s place in my life, and whether there is scope for me

ever producing a piece of art: I’m not sure I’ve achieved this yet. In fact, I’m pretty sure I haven’t and

don’t know if I ever will, but I’d like to keep trying - some more time to explore this would be very

welcome and I think the discipline of a course might do me good in this regard. On a practical level

there is always more to learn - getting better at whole-body portraits, improving my lighting skills,

aiming to produce wall-worthy output would all be good. Meeting like-minded lovers of photography

would be good, and learning to talk more cogently about what I photograph and why would also make

me happy.

I’m very interested in the role of the aleatory / the accidental in art and photography and would like to

explore this more, believing strongly in what Sally Mann said: “I try to remain flexible and open to the

vagaries of chance; like Napoleon, I figured that luck, aesthetic luck included, is just the ability to

exploit accidents… Unlike the young narrator in Swann’s Way praying for the angel of certainty to visit

him in his bedroom, I found myself praying for the angel of uncertainty.” I’d go a bit further: the

universe always seems to have better ideas than me so I like to try and let it in whenever possible, but

it is easier said than done - often I feel as if I am trying to control too much of what goes into the

photography and I would be better allowing more spontaneity to be present.

Finally I think the thing that would most improve my photography would be more courage and I

hope that the course might help with this.

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Since this is a photography course, here is a random photograph: