Stray September 2019 after the UCI World Championships image copyright BBC
The Stray after unprecedented rainfall during the UCI World Championship 2019
Introduction
The Stray project came about after seeing a book about the Tour of France visiting Harrogate in 2014. I have been following the Tour of France since I was a teenager and the Tour of Britain since it started in 2004. I followed the Tour of Britain for 10 years and have a collection of photographs that sit on the hard-drive. These photographs have never been processed as I have never had the drive to do anything with them, the joy was capturing the shots at the time. A future project will be to put together a book or Website on the changing view of the Tour of Britain.
When the UCI decided to come to Harrogate I made plans to create a blog to record the event, Initially the blog was going to mirror the book I had seen. I was planning to visit Harrogate Town Centre everyday around 6 o'clock and record the changes. At the same time I had just started my Documentary Project for Open College of Arts.
The project started well as I captured the preparation and setting up of the site. While walking around the Stray things were about to change, security took hold. The free access I was used to stopped, everywhere they were barriers, the project was evolving. The idea of recording the event changed to recording the barriers and the restrictions after being refused entry to the fan zone. My camera was too big and could be used to take professional images that could infringe the rights of the professional photographers. After this over zealous rule enforcement, that was later overturned, I decided the edit was going to be about the barriers.
Barriers was going to be about the restrictions of access to the Stray, an area that was covered by the Stray Acts that governed how long the public could be restricted to the Stray in any one year. I continued to visit the site every morning at walked around the site watching it grow and the ever changing Barriers being put into place.
The project was evolving. During the event it just rained and rained, roads were flooded and the Stray became a sea of mud. The racing was changed and greater restrictions were placed when visiting the Stray’s Fan zone.
We now had restriction caused by security requirements due to the international event and now the weather was taking its toll. The images were building up on the hard drive, initial concept now changed to “ Barriers- Welcome the Worlds", I never like copying others peoples work anyway. Project Barriers became an appendices .
Due to the damage to the Stray, Barriers continued, from steel fencing to plastic netting. The barriers stayed for a year, restrictions on access stayed in place during this time. I had now collected over 11,000 images about the event and was having difficulty in finding a path to completed the project.
I decided to enrol on a three day course on project managing a documentary shoot with Royal Photographic Society. On the course I learnt a different approach mainly about having a plan, knowing what you are going to shoot and taking the pictures. This methodology was quite different to my very scatter gun approach and letting the project evolve as it did. (Not sure if I would of known what the final oputcome would have been and this may be the case in many shoots whereby you do not have control)
During the course, a change of plan for the project, instead of taking the selected shots I was able select the images from my archive after mind mapping the project aims. I planned to create individual chapters from the collection of images to create a narrative of the journey of the repair.
The Stray - What did we do about it.
Images about the work to repair the Stray and the finished project
The Stray - How did it happenThe Stray
What were the contributing factors to the damage to the Stray
The Stray - Infrastructure
Insight to the structures placed onto the Stray for the event.
The Stray - What did we do about it
The work involved with repairing the ground
Barriers - Welcome to Harrogate. Project about the barriers put in place to protect commercial interest, security concerns and the land
Due to the present restrictions with the OCA for physical work being presented I have designed this work for publication on this web. The images specify for web browsing. Tones and page design came about after proofing various ideas with fellow photographers. Different tones for different parts of the project.
The overall feel of the project has been helped with the support of RPS team, their input on the actual image selection and page design was zero, the concept was due to their training
When the restrictions are lifted I would like to present the work in print form, this would involve reprocessing the work to A2 or A3 print size. Most of the images are uncropped and would benefit from being printed large, photography is never finished until you have an hard copy.
Ideas for presentation within a gallery
Displayed as Panorama
displayed in frames
Ptroposed Left Wall
Proposed right wall
Enjoy the Barriers and The Stray presentation (each chapter has a new page, links at the bottom of each page)
Robert Harris
Art photographer trying Documentary