when we first began the course, i was very uncertain as to the nature of it and what we’d actually be doing. there were so many briefs and so many different things and i wasn’t sure if they were to link in to each other or if they were going to be separate entities.

as we took our excursions to the two buildings (16 and 20), i noticed that building 16 struck more of a chord with me, with it’s weird and wonderful architecture and geometric patterns and colours, but still being attached to such a traditional looking building, i wondered the history of it. as soon as i realised it was riddled with feminist inhabitance and history i was immediately intrigued. i am quite political – and often outraged – when it comes to feminist matters in society and so, to see that there was such a rich history of so many women gathering together in one place to fight for their rights and freedom, it was inspiring.

i first found out the general basics of this history in our first brief when we had to introduce the building we’d chosen to focus on. i didn’t have much information at the time. i wasn’t very sure what to do with it though, making a video could have been fun and cool as well as doing a soundscape, but when it came down to it, i thought photography would be a challenging yet cool aspect to focus on.

depicting and/or reenacting history through still images is always a tough task, you have no words and no movement to guide you and aid you and so i thought being able to depict the great work of these women in the women’s political association would be a fun challenge. and a challenge it turned out to be.

i think i may have walked under a ladder or broken a mirror because my luck during production of this individual project was horrible. i lost almost two weeks to wisdom teeth removal with a bad reaction in that almost every part of my face bruised and i wasn’t capable of leaving the house. during this time, i realised that as i was producing photos, the costumes would need to be perfect and historically correct – it just turns out, that finding “titanic” /  edwardian era costumes is not easy. i drove from camberwell to kew to kew east to heidelberg to greensborough to preston to fitzroy into the cbd and to williamstown trying to find the perfect costume for our vida goldstein. all the costumes were either too early or too late and those that would have been perfect were the wrong size. with a stroke of luck, i stumbled into a vinnies near my house in templestowe only to find this beautiful red dress that swept the floor with ruffles and had a lace high neck. the colour was perfect, the size was perfect, the style was perfect. i bought it immediately and was so excited to find that it was similar to the clothes vida had worn.

george and i teamed up to use the same models as we were focusing on the same era and subjects and that relieved a lot of stress in finding models and we split the costs for the rest of the costumes and accessories. i helped george with his filming and then we did my photoshoot, which all went really smoothly and we both left very happy.

i was happy with how my photos turned out looking at them on the screen, the costumes of both males and females looked great and authentic and the setting was fantastic. rachel had told me about tracey moffat who produced historic photos but they were noticeably staged and this is where i drew my photographic inspiration from.

my greatest difficulty was most likely editing. i haven’t spent all that much time on photoshop, besides knowing the basics and so some of the editing of my photos isn’t exactly how i intended them to be. when i put the photos onto my computer i noticed that a lot of them were blurry as well or over exposed. i tried to edit this and fix it and i hope i was somewhat successful.

i decided that instead of focusing solely on the history of the building, i would also juxtapose the place of females in that society compared to that of today. i had done a photoshoot of a girl studying in storey hall, but my sd card chose that time to corrupt and so i was left without that image as it was too late by the time i realised and went to edit. but, i tried to rectify this through the inspiration of seeing a woman sitting outside of melbourne central station with a sign stating that she had been domestically abused and was left homeless now and had nothing to do and nowhere to go. i realised, that while feminism has come a long, long way since the days of vida goldstein, they’re still nowhere near where they should be in terms of true equality of the sexes. and so, instead of the positivity of a girl studying in storey hall, i instead decided to portray the fact that we still have lengths to go for the treatment of women in society.

i finished the photoessay with a photo of a memorial seat dedicated to vida goldstein’s efforts found in her hometown of portland in victoria. originally, it was going to finish on an image of the plaque dedicated to her found in parliament house gardens but it was in a restricted section that i could not get access too, so instead, i took a roadtrip. it was in a lovely and serene location and i felt very at peace when i was there. i double exposed this image with an out of copyright image of an article from 1903 when she became the first woman in the british empire to stand for election to a national parliament. i thought this was fitting as a representation that over 100 years later and her efforts are still noted, appreciated and recognised every day.

if i were to redo this brief, i may consider having used video as i feel it may have been slightly less issue ridden and i would have been more confident in editing my clips through it, rather than guessing around (and a lot of youtube tutorials) with photoshop.

i believe that with the fact that i was using photography i could have produced more images than what i did and overall, i am a bit disappointed with how my final product has turned out. visually, i believe they’re appealing but i don’t think i did the topic and the history justice in my portrayal.

this brief, and really, the course in general, has really given me a greater appreciation for the architecture of melbourne. while i’ve always appreciated melbourne and the multitude of stylings of building we have – from modern to old – i can now look at all these buildings and be fully aware that there’s a great and rich history behind it all, if only we do a little bit of digging. i have also garnered a greater appreciation for the links between place and memory. not only as a whole, but for each individual. from being able to see everyone create such wonderful and all different individual pieces from only two buildings was really impressive and in doing my research and seeing how place and memory affects different people, it’s really allowed me to see the importance of architecture in another light.