Jill Cole - Guest Lecture

Today, Wednesday 18th January we had a Guest Lecture, Jill Cole who is a Documentary Photographer and artist. In her work she uses the environmental issues that occur on a day to day basis and portrays that within her work. Not only is she an Artist and Photographer but she participates and conducts her own lectures in order to show others how her wok is influenced. During her lecture she talked about her current project she is doing, in which she uses a layering technique where she takes a number of photos and layers them on top of one another and bring pieces of each image through to the top layer giving off really interesting effects. I like the way she wants to show the different layers of the forest by using this technique.

One piece of her work that I really like is called 'Between here and there' which created in 2009 consists of her putting birds into individual bags and photographing the movement. At first I didn't like the idea of the birds being confined into a bag and then photographing the struggle of them trying to get free, But at the end of her work she writes what exactly happened and what the images were trying to show. The birds were part of the National Nature Conservation and were waiting to have their identification tags attached to their legs, so while they were waiting she was able to photograph them, as soon as this had happened they were then released into the wild again, and none of the birds were harmed. The idea of this project was to show the movement and how fragile the birds are.

http://www.jillcole.com/