Discovering the River Sherbourne

In the last couple of months last year I began a new project. I pondered for a long time after graduation trying to think up an interesting idea and I think I might have found it. 

Coventry's hidden river, the River Sherbourne, flows from its source near Allesley, under the streets of the centre of the city, to Baginton where it joins the river Sowe. Given that the river is surely the reason Coventry was built here in the first place it now feels to me to be undervalued and neglected. There are plans to uncover part of the the river in the city centre and clean it up but I do think that it's a great shame that it doesn't appear to have been looked after for such a long time.

As I'm not sure at this point where the project is going to take me and I've not done a huge amount of landscape photography before my starting point for taking photos is to document the course of the river whilst researching and learning about historic use of the river.

For my first shoot I went on a recce to Hawks End in search of the source of the river and this is what I found when I got there... 

As you can see, I struggled a little bit. In some spots it's very difficult to see the river through all of the foliage. I'm hoping that at least some of this fall off over winter and there'll be a better view of the water.

My Sunday Photo

My Sunday Photo

My Sunday Photo

P10 final sequence

I spent a good while sequencing the images. First things first, I printed out all my photographs from all of my shoots (I find it so much easier to see what I'm looking at if they're printed out and I can physically move things around). I started by looking at all the objects in relation to the brownie recipe I have and started to pick out everything that you might need to be able to make them. I laid them all out roughly in the order you would need them. I then looked at the different backgrounds as I wanted a regular sequence of the different patterns. More by luck that judgement I think, it all worked out fairly well, there was only a few that didn't fit which I re-shot. Ideally I would have re-shot all of the objects on all of the backgrounds to give my self all the options but I just didn't have time, especially since my final submission for the module is going to be a photo book so I needed to allow enough time for that to get printed. 

P10 background experimentation

After my second shoot in the studio I hit the charity shops of Hereford looking for table cloths and patterned material. I was surprised to find that there wasn't as much choice as I was expecting. I guess it's just one of those things where it seems like there's lots about but when you're looking for something there's none to be found! So, there's a couple that I've bought and a couple that I've borrowed from other people. The red gingham one is actually one of my duvet covers photographed, firstly the with the right side out but I felt that it was a little bit too vibrant so I turned it inside to mute down the colours. 

These are recipes that had belong to my Nanna. The one above she had written by hand and the one below she typed up using a type writer. These will be included in the final body of work to give it context. I've photographed them for now but I want to try scanning them.