Peter Dench Artist Talk

I'm not normally interested in photojournalism and Peter Dench’s style of work is nothing like my own so I probably wouldn't use him as artist research in my visual diary but when I went to his talk the main thing that I wanted to take from it was knowledge about the industry and succession in photography. He mentioned about Dench Diary which is a blog he has where he writes about his work and projects that he is doing, this is something he suggested doing and something that I have thought about doing when I get my work online. I think it is a good way for fans or people that are interested in your work can have more information about your thought process or just how you are getting on with current work.

He said that ‘it is very important from an early age to know where you are from and who you are’. I think this was important to write down to try and remember. I agree with him a lot on this, whether it is a good or a bad thing, knowing where you are from is a great way to start your practice when it comes to personal work and will make you understand more about yourself and who you are. It will help to sculpt your work around the things you know best and things you have known for all of your life.

He said that at 18 when looking though a Martin Parr book, his eyes were opened to the fact that you don’t need to travel so far away to get great photos. At the time of him saying this I was thinking that the only way I would be able to get great photos is if I travelled somewhere far away and new to me, that everything around me had already been used and done and there wasn’t much left to see, but going back to his point about knowing from an early age… I think that can be a good stepping stone to staying where you know and using that as a way to make something new out of thing that may be used and done.

The final thing that he said which I really liked was ‘If you can disarm your audience with humour they expect what’s coming next’ to prove this point he showed us a few photos which were quite funny and then showed us something which was quite horrible which instantly lowered the tone of the room. One thing that I have been worrying about with my work is that the more grim and weird things I show, people will eventually get bored or always expect me to top myself and when I can’t they will no longer have an interest so maybe I should try and ‘disarm my audience’ somehow so they don’t know what is going to come next, I just don’t really know how to do that yet .