This morning Mick and I was invited to Ben & Harry's School to view Ben's final pieces for his Photography Exam. Ben is in the lower Sixth Form or Year 12 as they call it now.
He has done two large pieces on Phobia's. One is his phobia about Spiders and the other one is on my Phobia, "Clowns".. In the Spider piece Ben constructed a large Spiders Web and then took pictures of Spiders and webs and these were placed over the web. In the second piece about Clowns, Ben made a mask which his friend Ollie wore, then Ben took photographs of him on a flight of stairs in the School. Its really creepy as four of the photographs are in black and white and only the mask is in colour. He also did a collage of photograph's that he's taken throughout his course.
For his final exam piece he chose "Time Line", he used photographs of my Dad, his Pop's from a child to adulthood, he took a panoramic view of the school grounds and then placed photographs of my Dad into it. It starts in Black and White and then seamlessly runs into colour. There's even a picture of my Dad's face in the clouds. If you click on the photo's they will pop up bigger and you can just see my Dad's face above the Dragon sculpture. I'd already seen this on normal paper, but what a difference when I saw it on proper photographic paper and all put together. Ben will be allowed to keep all his pieces and this one we are going to get framed. My Dad would have been totally chuffed to bits with it and so proud of Ben. I have to admit it did bring a tear to my eye.
We had a really good look round at all the other pupils work and there was some fantastic photography.
Just got to wait now for his final exam results to find out what grade he has achieved...