Hello everyone!
Could you please help me and correct my Statement of Purpose? I do not know the rules of beginning and ending it...
Here are the task from the school: A one-page statement of purpose of no more than 500 words in length, describing your reasons for applying to the program, and elaborating on the influences on your work and its current direction, as well as your interests and research.
The problem is that I need to make my statement shorter (now it is about 800 words), but it's not easy to throw something from the text...
Thank you in advance!!!
Deadline is 18 January 2013
STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
I can't remember the exact moment when I first felt interest for photography. My movement toward it was subconscious. My curiosity changed into the urge to explore it at first and into devotion later. By that time I was studying management in Moscow according to my parents' advice. But my life there seemed to be senseless. I felt I chose a wrong path. The city was rejecting me. Gladly, it was mutual. I had to start anew. So I took my chance and moved to Saint Petersburg to study visual journalism at the Journalism Department of Saint-Petersburg State University.
There my attitude to photography began to form.
Namely it helped me to understand photography as a tool to explore and to become aware of ambient reality, to fix connections between the outside and the inside and to escape from my own doubts.
One of the most fruitful moments there was my acquaintance with Iurii Matveev, who was my university lecturer at first and then became my mentor. It was he who taught me composition at our department's photo studio and who conducted a seminar «Modern photography: Manner and Style». There I knew about destinies and works of leading masters of photography, such as Edward Weston, Walker Evans, W. Eugene Smith, Josef Koudelka, Diana Arbus, Robert Frank etc. All these events in aggregate have influenced me by giving guidelines in the infinite space of photography. Thereby I was learning to consider, to analyze and to deduce facts from things I had seen and had experienced. I started to treat myself as someone who looks at the world through lens of a camera.
Since the autumn of 2011, along with weekly individual classes with Matveev, I have been working a lot creating photographic series on different issues. The weekly review of my work, as much as our discussions about problems of photography, has become an integral part of our classes. I try to analyze every phenomenon that touches me with a help of a camera. So I explore its abilities and try to understand what photography is to me. Undoubtedly, I am at the very beginning that is full of uncertainty and self-criticism. Sometimes it hampers the process, but eventually helps me by making me think, reason and work harder.
With the lapse of time the sphere of issues and phenomena I wanted to explore by camera started to form. My own character and personal experience played the main role there. The man and the marks of his existence always have been a noteworthy object for me but at the same time confusing and irritating and even forcing me to close myself in. That is why I look at the man from a far or watch just the order of things created by him: alive and inanimate, a landscape and a scenery where the theatre of everyday life unfolds. Probably, this is some kind of a «distanced view» that becomes a means of struggling with my own fears.
Another object that has been exciting me more from year to year is social interaction, namely the rules which are accepted by society in case to construct it. I divide social behavior into two lines: «conventional» - with values and rules that are clear to most people, and «novel» (unexplored) - the line which is separate and tends to reject and to ignore the rules of the first one. I realize that this investigation will take a long time and requires defining the object concretely. There is no one and only way of solution, but variation and ambiguity. That is why I am interested in it.
My wish to explore these social phenomena forces me to advance. It is inseparably linked with perceiving unknown things. This is exactly that decisive moment because of which I decided to apply for ICP-Bard MFA program in Advanced Photographic Studies.
Having my thesis dedicated to social aspects of documentary photography written and my bachelor degree in Journalism received I decided to continue my research and become a creator of photographic material for it. This is impossible to carry it out without consolidation and broadening my own skills and knowledge in the field of photography. And, as I suppose, that is practicable at ICP thanks to its rich history, archives and progressive (advanced) approaches to educational process that includes participation of experts in photography.
Another reason why I choose ICP as an educational organization was the fact that it is engaged in researching and solving the problems that are exclusively connected with photography, without limiting it by the scopes of applied arts as it happens at other schools. I am interested in widening the limits of photography by investigating and applying its unexplored abilities, getting it involved in solving urgent problems including social ones.
Also I want to live and to act being surrounded by people who devote their time and lives to photographic issues as I do and for whom photography is a key tool in their own researches and aspirations.
