User:David Gilbert Wright (Documentary Photographer)

How it began

I did a one year Foundation in Art & Design prior to going to the London College of Printing (LCP) in 1976. Photography was taught as a technical tool. There was no real emphasis on it as a creative medium with its own genres, styles, ‘artists’ etc. So Visual Analysis at LCP was a refreshing and very interesting part of the course. It was during Year 1 that I began to follow my own research into Gestalt. I remember early in Yr 1 we went to the Art & Design section and did a short course in drawing. One of the problems set was how to represent movement, which I had done during the Foundation course. Everybody tried to draw in the Italian Futurist way and during the Crit, it was evident that their work was trying to show movement by kind of multi-layer fixed image drawings showing the positions of the person rather like placing several pieces a of Cine film on top of each other. I put up one piece. A square of white paper 15” x 15” with a small 1” black square in the top left corner. When asked to explain how this fitted the brief, I described the scanning process that I thought people did when they looked at things, e.g. moving around the square searching for other aspects of the image. This set me off on a voyage of discovery about how patterns are formed and how we try to make sense of what I now call ‘Incomplete Gestalts’. Needless to say, my piece of work was chided by both staff and students because it did not contain any ‘quality’ drawing, which I think was the bottom line for Photography courses at that time where technical quality was important. What got marks were perfect black & white images with the full range of tones and colour Cibachromes without castes or white ‘holes’. As the first year moved on, I realised that if I was to pass the course I needed to be technically proficient so I read everything, perfected lighting, exposure control, print quality. I donned a white coat and assisted the technician managing the colour process machines outside of sessions. I got a job with the Ministry of Defence during the summer doing all kinds of scientific and clinically perfect professional work. But at the same time, I realised that there were boundaries around the medium of photography that had not yet been tested. One in particular interested me, what happened to the image at the other end of the focusing ring. So, I started taking photos completely out of focus. It also seemed the right thing to do. 1976-77 was a turbulent time with the advent of Punk and it seemed that rule books were being torn up! Other students at the LCP also started moving away from what had gone before and started working more conceptually, more philosophically and with a great deal of humour entered their work.