Mission Statement - To create an exhibition detailing the architectural heritage of Kingston Upon Thames.
I am generally very interested in buildings and building styles and wanted to study the City & Guilds architecture module. As it happened a couple of my friends were also interested in the same module and so we decided to make the project a team effort as this was catered for in the course syllabus. We also decided that we wanted the images to have a purpose or use. Kingston was chosen as the subject as it is a medieval market town with a large variety of buildings from different eras. Having some contacts at Kingston University and museum I quickly found someone who was interested in exhibiting the final images as a study of Kingston. This then defined our mission statement for the project.
This portfolio was hard work to create and required a lot of planning and team effort. If I had more time (and money), I would have bought or hired a perspective control lens to minimise the convergence problems caused by using wide angle lenses on tall buildings. I would also like to have tried using a field or technical camera for some of the buildings as apart from the larger negative size, there is a lot more perspective control available. As already mentioned, the street furniture caused us a big problem in certain places and we picked the days and times of our visit to minimise the number of vehicles and people on the roads. It is interesting to note that even in the 60s when Nikolaus Pevsner did his survey of surrey and printed his book, he commented "Kingston suffers terribly from traffic congestion. What little there is of serious interest in the centre can rarely be seen for busses, cars and lorries." I would also like to cover more of the buildings however time, money and the brief did not permit this.
The following images and text formed my part of the group submission. Click the icon below to view the portfolio.
