Urban Landscape: Curation & Quality Control

Having finished taking urban photographs in class and during self-study sessions, the next step is to do quality control and curation. Before doing curation, it is important to understand what it is and its important to the overall project. 

In an article on the art of curating by Tucker (no date) "The traditional definition of ‘curate’ is the deliberate selection of objects or content which are to be shown to the public in a museum or institution, most typically in the form of art. To ‘curate an exhibit’ is to create a collection of works by the same or different artists that have some commonality for an involved interpretation of the material, for an intended audience."

According to the Art Gallery of South Australia (no date), curators along with artists are storytellers in their own right. This is because curators make decisions about which works of art should be displayed and how an audience should see it. They deice the themes and ideas that the audience will experience when they see the selection of art.

As such, curation is the process of creating a collection of works for a certain interpretation or an intended audience. This is importance for the audience's experience and understanding of the art. I will be curating my photographs into a collection for my portfolio, with the interpretation and theme of the photographs being sceneries of isolation in Leicester.

The following is the curation process for photography according to annabel (no date)

1. Project management - Set up a system to sort and organise the photographs
2. Digitisation - conversion of negatives or prints into a digital form.
3. Image strorage - classify images into years, with important details such as name, etc.
4. Archiving solutions - prevent damage on the photographs
5. Curating photobooks - look at sample photo books; discuss style and design preferences. Create a storyline by analysing the selected photos and build a layout that best illustrate them on each page.

The process above though is more into film photography, and I skipped some steps as I am using a DSLR. Before taking the photography, I have already decided to sort and organise the photographs based on date within the CF card in the camera. I then did digitisation by pulling out the CF card, and putting on a card reader which connects it to the laptop. After that, I put the images on a separate folder, classifying them by latest to earliest taken. None of the images were damaged, and thus, I moved on to curate the photos.

Firstly, I looked at all the photographs I took during class sessions and self-study sessions. Then, I moved what I felt as the best photographs befitting the theme of isolation to a different folder. The theme of isolation that I meant here is that there must be no humans, but traces of them through things such as architecture, items, technology (cars), and others. Afterwards, I did some quality control on them using photoshop. I will talk about one example.

The picture above is the original picture I took on the roads of Westcotes. Using photoshop, I cropped the CR2 image and changed its angle to be more balanced and centre-aligned. Afterwards, I used the tone curve, increasing the exposure of the photo to make it brighter.

This is the final result of the quality control I did. Another example is a picture I took near the Culture Exchange of tall buildings and its big shadows.

For this photo, I first cropped the image, especially the left side of the image. Then, I straightened the image by changing the angle. Afterwards, I increased the exposure a little bit, increased saturation, and made the shadows greener to give more color to the sky and buildings.

I did the same for other photographs that I chose. I exported the images in jpeg format into another folder. After finishing, I looked at my selections again and reviewed whether or not the images portrays some sort of isolation. After being pleased with my selections, I have finished quality control and curation of my images. The next step is to create the portfolio with "Isolated Leicester" as the title.

Sources:

• Tucker, L.L. (no date) The art of curating...art, BigLife Magazine. Available at: https://www.biglifemag.com/the-art-of-curating-art/ (Accessed: January 27, 2023). 

• Curating your photography collection (no date) annabel. Available at: https://annabel.co.uk/news/curating-photography-collection (Accessed: March 13, 2023).

• What is a curator? (no date) Art Gallery of South Australia. Available at: https://www.agsa.sa.gov.au/education/resources-educators/agsa-art-school-online/what-curator/ (Accessed: March 12, 2023).