Murray Ballard
Murray Ballard visited during the beginning of our third year, with his work mainly focusing on cryogenics entitled ‘The Prospect Of Immortality’. This project was done as part of his 3rd year at university as he is a recent graduate. This was not one of my favoured fields of photography but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
The idea behind the project was cryogenics, and how people could be immortalised in some shapes or forms. It was looking at how we can bring people back to life and the science behind it.
Inspiration for his work came from a few locations; Gregory Crewdsons work entitled ‘Twilight’ proved to be his main inspiration. He would recreate these images by eavesdropping and then forming an image from these conversations. Another one of his great inspirations was Alec Soth and his project entitled ‘Sleeping By The Mississippi’. From this he began to think that ‘real life’ was far more interesting than any form of constructed world, so he moved on from Gregory’s work and became obsessed with the real world. Soon he came across a book called ‘Ghetto’ which was the beginning of his ideas for this project.
Soon the idea of preservation formed, and how things throughout history were being preserved. He visited places such as the natural history museum, looking at how animals and historical artefacts were preserved, both today and how preservation techniques occurred and were displayed. He would photograph these samples and soon he had created an archive of all the preserved items.
Soon later he met up with a man called Adam Sinclair, and his wife. He went to talk about preservation methods and soon ended up having a lengthy conversation about cryogenics. He soon befriended Adam and would visit him almost daily to photograph all of his cryogenic equipment and how Adam worked. This was the turning point for his project and all of a sudden he knew that this is what he wanted his Final Major Project to be about.
He wanted his project to become much larger than just this one man. He contacted the ‘South Square Trust,’ a trust that helps students fund FMP’s through grants. Murray used this fund to send himself to Arizona to visit a Cryogenics Lab where he became much better educated about the goings on and how it worked.
I did find this project very interesting but it wasn’t the area of photography that I am thoroughly interested in.