Earlier this year I was a guest lecturer at the Willem De Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. The assignment I gave the (graphic design) students was called: From I was here to where am I?. It was about my travels to China, and about the way I looked at China, and how the photos I made were showing my own, very subjective interpretations. I gave the students 1000! of my photographs as source material. Their assignment was the following:

Construct a subjective, fictional story about Beijing using 1000 photos made by me in Beijing between 2006 and 2008. Your interpretation of Beijing, based on my views of Beijing, is what is important. The photos may be cut-up, manipulated, rearranged.

Photos from their first presentation can be seen here:
http://www.remarksfromafar.com/afar_minor.html

The end results were many small publications (booklets) and one film, all using my photos as a starting point.

> Example 01
Here a Dutch student worked together with a Japanese exchange student. They had conversations about each others perceptions of the East, and turned that dialogue into a booklet:

There was a green and a red transparent sheet. Use the one, and you could read the views of the Asian student, use the other, and you could read the views of the European student.
You can download a PDF of the whole booklet here: beijing.pdf (beware! it’s a very large file – 16 mb)

> Example 02
These students went to Amsterdam to take photographs in Chinatown there. They first made a selection of my Beijing photographs, and then went to find comparible situations in Amsterdam. This resulted in a booklet,which was cut in half, making it possible to mix the different worlds.

You can download a PDF of the whole booklet here: anouk_lisette.pdf
(5 mb)

> Example 03
This is not the final result, but part of the process of these students’ project. They found an article about the use and meaning of colour in China, and decided to organize the 100o photos by colour. They wanted to see if the use of colour in Beijing was changing. They found software online that helped create this document:

> click image to enlarge

> Example 04
Here the students chose to make a model, a kind of filmdecor, using the photos. Then using stop-motion, they made a short animation. They tried to give a sense of how it is to look at, to frame the environment that you’re in. (This is also about how it is to be an observer).

china decors 2 from Natasa Lops on Vimeo.