Guest Lecturer- Carl Bigmore

This morning we had a guest lecture form Carl Bigmore, a documentary photographer from London, who last year completed his MA at The London College of Communication.
10 years ago Carl studied a BA in Digital and Lens media, a very broad course covering all aspects of photography, videography and web based media. At this point he was influenced by photographers like Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and Ryan McGinley, which led him to photograph in a documentary style which was quite personal. Later on he became more influenced by the work of Alec Soth, a documentary and fine art photographer, Carl described this as a pivotal moment for him and his journey of discovering how he wanted his work to be. He loved the stillness which was present in Soth's work and this new reflective, more considered way of working.

I really liked the fact Carl showed us his very early work which he created whilst studying his BA, which he openly admitted he doesn't really like anymore, but showed us for the purpose of demonstrating the evolution of his work so we could see how he has progressed and really redefined his practice as a practitioner.
He urged us to enter competitions and apply for bursaries as this will help us further our practice and receive funding to do so, something which hasn't been mentioned to use before is the opportunity of applying for grants and bursaries for our practice. A competition which he strongly suggested we enter is Magenta's Flash Forward who publish a book of practitioners work who they deem to be promising new talent, Carl's work was published in the 2015 version of this, and I plan to submit work of my own for the 2017 awards as this year I am too late for the 2016.

I really enjoyed todays lecture, I love the aesthetic of Carl's work, which is similar to that which I want to achieve in my narrative work. I plan to shoot with a film camera as I have never really experimented with that format, all of Carl's personal work is shot on film, as well as some selected commercial work, which I really like as film seems to be a format which is slowly being faded out of the industry.