Every Student Desk in Grays School of Art

Well almost, two people did not want to be included.. which is fine, and very interesting! It was great to see how different each desk was, especially the first year hall desks, which apart from one or two were completely empty. This is probably partly due to the fact that you have to share desks, i remember it being pretty cramped when I was in first year, also the desks are only temporary as everyone moves around every few weeks when they start a new brief. But I can’t help but think, being such a large classroom, some may not feel comfortable leaving their personal belongings out for others they might not know very well to see or even steal.

To be honest, if I had taken the photos at a decent time of day instead of night time, when most people have gone home, probably a few more people would have been pretty unhappy about me taking snaps of their desks. However, they weren’t there so I suppose what they don’t know won’t hurt them! I guess choosing to take the photos when i know most people won’t be there says a lot about my own personal boundaries, I did after all feel a little creepy going around doing this.. and didn’t want to cause any controversy.

You may have also noticed that these are digital photos, usually I’m pretty against the throwaway digital image, but Grays just got some awesome new Canon 550D’s and thought this was a good enough excuse to test ‘em out. I think I’m in love with this new camera, in fact if I was a camera, I’d probably marry it and have it’s beautiful camera babies…

So, now I have collected these photos, what am I going to do with them?
First of all, I was thinking of making a Blurb book of all of these images. Almost as a mock-yearbook.
I would also like to project a looped video of these images onto an empty desk, (the above video is just a quick little thing, I shall be doing another..). The looped video would probably be on a loop time of a few hours, each desk getting some good airtime of around 15 seconds and would be slowly crossfaded into one another to create a seamless edit. Being crossfaded would also add flow and show the similarities and differences of each desk, the main similarity being they are all taken from exactly the same angle. This is a very crude drawing of how I would like it to turn out..