Final Evaluation & Statements

Exhibition Statement 

Behind Closed Doors, Jorden-Vivien Jones-Vines

The body and mind can present itself in both obvious and mysterious ways that the eye can be oblivious to. Not all disabilities and illnesses are visible, and this project shows my own struggle, making myself the subject of my camera. I think sometimes it’s important to make yourself the subject of your camera not only to remember what it feels like for all your subjects but to reconnect with your inner self.

Newspaper Statement 

Behind Closed Doors, Jorden-Vivien Jones-Vines

Behind Closed Doors depicts how the body and mind can present itself in both obvious and mysterious ways that the eye can be oblivious to. Not all disabilities and illnesses are visible, and this project shows my own struggle, making myself the subject of my camera. I think sometimes it’s important to make yourself the subject of your camera not only to remember what it feels like for all your subjects but to reconnect with your inner self. This body of work was my final major project for university and it give me an outlet for my frustrations on a topic that is widely misrepresented in the twenty first century.

Final Evaluation

This has been the longest project but not long enough. Unfortunately I have been very poorly with my fibromyalgia and having COVID  a second time, however I think this is my most in-depth project ever and I feel like I have spent much more time on it as I have enjoyed it much more and I look forward to continuing it in my future as a long-standing project that I want to finally reproduce as another book as a part two. I enjoyed being able to experiment and use myself as the subject which I was happier with than I thought until I had to zoom up close on my face. Some people find documentary project really hard as hey are so close to it but I have found it clarifying and almost help as an outlet for my frustrations. I think next time I would like to use physical manipulation as I have previously researched.

I did decide to use Blurb again for my FMP as I was happy with the quality of my last book and service other than delivery and because their Bookwright Plugin is much more user friendly that Adobe InDesign. I chose to shoot on multiple medias to experiment and too see what worked not only the best but to see what sort of images I could produce by using mixed media and whether it would give me any other ideas. I decided to shoot digitally because shooting on film is just not feasible at the moment with the cost of living going up and only working a part time job, I would however like to shoot more film in the future.

The reason I chose to produce a book for my final major project was because even though I have found it stressful I have found that I actually much more enjoy producing a book rather than prints and feel like there is more to be proud of and that I have achieved a great feat. When I was deciding on what to write inside my book I wanted to be as true and real as I could and wrote straight from my heart and wrote it straight away as is. I read it to a few peers, family members and friends and they all assured me it was great and that I didn’t need to rewrite it which was very reassuring. As I discovered whilst in post-production for ‘Route, Record, Repeat’ and ‘Deep Connection’, I get on better with Camera RAW and Adobe Bridge for simple edits other than for exposures which I created in Adobe Photoshop. I did decide to experiment with the spot heal button also to move parts of my images around and duplicate them but I decided they mostly looked odd and didn’t work very well. I decided to try and use ambient light to my advantage and tried my very best to not include artificial lighting as I began to feel as though that took away credibility. I chose to remove the Blurb Logo comes because I feel as though a book without a company logo of the publisher is more professional and the blue logo in my opinion ruins the end of the book.

Now that my professional website is all up and running I can successfully say that I am very happy with my brand and how it has all turned out, as well as with all my social being up to date and linked. I was chuffed being able to link my Issuu to my website and to upload my final major project to show my most personal documentary work to date.

Overall, I am very happy with the final product. For this project I decided to get an image wrap instead of a dusk jacket which I am much more please with because the dust jacket got on my nerves before and I found it got damaged too easily. Last time for reflections I also decided against putting any text on my front cover as it worked better for me like that, however I wasn’t as happy when the book came and over time I now wish I had put my title on the cover. So in regard to this I decided that this time I was going to put the title on the front page. I am much happier with my font and text size this time. I selected ‘Georgia’ and size 16. For my reflections book my font was 24pt which didn’t look all too big on the screen but when it came in the post it was massive and it looked awful. So I was very careful in selecting my font size, I think I could of got away with one or two sizes even small but 16 is a comfortable reading size.

I chose to have my front cover text white because black text didn’t work on my hair as I am a brunette so I would have lost the word doors. White text works well and I would use it again in a similar situation. This time after many layouts that I have unfortunately lost when I was sorting my hard drive out I decided to use two of Bookwrights layouts as I was looking further into the software settings and discovered it. I thought I would try it out and I really liked the size, it worked nicely. I decided that I didn’t want all of my images the same size as that is a bit boring and I wanted one to two middle eight’s. So I decided to not over complicate it and go for two different sizes, left to right (blank – big, blank – big, blank – smaller and repeat other than the middle eight’s).

After speaking with Paul and Andy we decided not to have my portraits all the way through as I wanted to convey invisibleness and to focus more on space and emptiness. So for this reason there I only a couple of portraits throughout.  However I think next time I would like to experiment with lots of portraits as well as adding in more body handwriting as this adds more depth and personalization. As well as conveying invisibleness I also wanted to lay my day to day life to show it can almost look normal, like other peoples, although I don’t think there is a normal out there. The image of the recycle bin was one of my favorites for its simplicity. Some of my peers didn’t get it but Andy got it straight away. My life is not great at all from the fibromyalgia side of things and it makes me feel like rubbish and I thought this was a brilliant way to say this.

I chose to add a border to my images this time, a very think black border to outline my images and to give them more purpose. I also decided to only have left pages for my middle eight’s as the left pages are weaker and I think none of my images are particularly weak but there are definitely stronger ones. I chose to add an image of myself to the back and a quote because it looked more auto-biographical which is what you find on most autobiographies, not necessarily all on the back though. Some at the front inside and some at the back inside. Overall I am really happy with my book and how it looks.