Trusty Wikipedia defines research as:
Research can be defined as the search for knowledge, or as any systematic investigation, with an open mind, to establish novel facts, usually using a scientific method. The primary purpose for applied research (as opposed to basic research) is discovering, interpreting, and the development of methods and systems for the advancement of human knowledge on a wide variety of scientific matters of our world and the universe.
Scientific research relies on the application of the scientific method, a harnessing of curiosity. This research provides scientific information and theories for the explanation of the nature and the properties of the world around us. It makes practical applications possible. Scientific research is funded by public authorities, by charitable organizations and by private groups, including many companies. Scientific research can be subdivided into different classifications according to their academic and application disciplines.
Artistic research, also seen as 'practice-based research', can take form when creative works are considered both the research and the object of research itself. It is the debatable body of thought which offers an alternative to purely scientific methods in research in its search for knowledge and truth.
I do not want to become too complicated about this, but I do want you to have a think about what is this thing we call research and what it should look like. In the years BG (Before Google) if you wanted to study the surrealists you would go to a dusty catalogue in a library and then with luck you'd find an example of a painting or sculpture hanging in a gallery - very slowly you'd construct a picture in your mind of what surrealism was about. Photography, likewise, was disseminated via newspapers and magazines - all published after they had been merited good by editors and printers - so you were unlikely to see many samples of family snapshots (apart from your own family album). Now it is estimated that in Facebook alone, 30 BILLION photographs were uploaded in 2009! So how and what we research, the methodology that we use, the scope and the approach - all of that needs to be defined and made visible. Research is a big word that means different things to different people.
A quick quiz, then - which of the following activities do you think constitute "Research" for the outcomes of this subject:
1. Asking your mother, your neighbour, or a stranger at the pub what they think a certain photograph is about, or what it means.
2. Listening to your ipod for inspiration for a shot.
3. Going for a walk and stopping to take shots of the landscape (on your hipstamatic:)
4. Seeing a documentary on Annie Liebovitz.
5. Reading anything written by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, John Berger or Susan Sontag.
6. Spending time looking at the new hang of Aboriginal Art at the National Gallery of Australia.
7. Looking at vintage Vogue magazines from the National Library of Australia (or Vinny's if you are lucky to find some there).
8. Carefully consuming Frankie from cover to cover and then redoing some of the shots to perfection.
9. Studying every image produced by your favourite photographer.
10. Trying and reshooting several times before you get the shot you were after for your studio brief.
The answer, in my mind, is ALL OF THE ABOVE! And this is what you should be blogging about. Some of you have a blog for folio and another for research - if that works for you fine, otherwise you can put it all in the same place. The trick with research is to capture it, to document the process. You might do all of these activities without leaving much of a trace, and then it is impossible to assess your process - this is where blogging is so handy. Do not wait for specific tasks, start entering everything in your blog as it happens.
A useful thing to do is tagging - develop a series of subcategories for your entries so that you can then sort by topic.
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