Better Lives – Blog post 4
I really enjoyed looking through my fellow SMC Better Lives students blogs for insights that I had previously not thought of throughout my own unit – giving us all the chance to learn from all different types of fashion practices. But the blog I wanted to review was from you, John Bloom.
I loved the way that you made your blog personal and genuine to you, drawing from your own struggles through the COVID-19 pandemic. Through speaking on mental health discussions with his friends to describing his own feelings as “drowning”, which I think was a good word choice to communicate to your readers feelings of helplessness. Which I think a lot of people are feeling like right now so it’s nice that someone is speaking up about it. The Better Lives unit as a whole is about looking into societal and environmental issues from around us and trying to better those and this is exactly what you have done this by twisting the lockdown into a positive since we still have each other at a ‘click of a button’.
I also really appreciated how keen you was to learn more about different fashion industry practices when this unit started. It seems like you would’ve put your all into any course chosen for you to diversify your practice and learn more technical skills. This is also what the better lives unit is all about, diversifying us to make us the best fashion practitioners we can be. Bloom spoke about after this Better Lives unit its now shifted the way that he thinks about portraits, and probably all art. Having more of a respect for the practices now. This is so nice to hear and it shows how the Better Lives unit has impacted him forever.
You showed a diverse amount of knowledge about the course you got put on, Portrait Photography. A subject I before didn’t know much about. Bloom spoke about Portrait Photography as a “performance” where the props were the actors. “Using space to bring upon sensory feelings” Blooms’ knowledge of the subject helped him be able to create conceptual portraits, using techniques to highlight and dramatize certain things which in turn made his portraits more conceptual (the concept being technology through time). I did notice though, there wasn’t much talk of the Better Lives themes as much as you did in your other blog posts and if you didn’t know how to link it the Better Lives lecture by Nick Almond: emerging technologies in fashion, this could’ve have you some points to help link the topics together for easier writing.