Exhibition Evaluation

Over the past few weeks myself and four other photographers, have been working together to plan, promote and prepare for an exhibition of our own photography works. Overall, the process has been challenging, using my own skills as well as learning new skills to produce a successful event. Each member of the team contributed to the process leading up to the exhibition. I had several tasks helping me to improve my skills and help the team in the process leading up to the final event. these included; coming up with the team name 'Interaction', booking a photographer for the event, helping with the invitation design, fundraising, creating a social media event and inputing to group decisions.

I have been working as part of a team, but also on my own photography exhibit, I have challenged myself to work on my time management skills to complete all work needing completing. When I found myself with little time to complete a task, I would ask the team to help contribute to the work needing to be completed. This became important when fundraising for the exhibition, as a group we each had a task to complete to help with the contribution of fundraising. Our main fundraising event was a bake sale, which everyone helped to raise a successful amount, to cover the cost of hiring our venue. My task was to complete the risk assessment and to gain permissions to have the stall in a University building. Unfortunately, due to changes with RA this took longer than expected. After explaining this to the team, we decided that we would need to have a back up plan for if we could not gain permission. While I worked with staff from the University to complete the RA, other members of the team began to come up with other ideas to raise money. After sharing the problem with the team, another photographer managed to gain permission to put on the sale in our local town centre. Allowing the bake sale to still go ahead as planned in a more central location.

As a team we decided to have several group meetings leading up to the event, allowing us to discuss all plans and set goals of tasks needing to be completed by the following meeting. As we felt communication was key, we had a group chat which everyone could contribute to decisions being made when we were not together on a social media network. Speaking online helped us give each other feedback when needed, and contribute our own opinions on decisions being made.

Another area of the preparation where communication had great significance was with the promotion of the event. To give our exhibition an online presence I created a Facebook event, which informed guests everything they needed to know about the evening. I used key information which would gain interest into our exhibition, as well as photographing and publishing a photograph of the venue, giving guests the opportunity to see where the event would take place.

One of my main roles for the exhibition was to design and create the invitations for our event. I used the design of our group logo as inspiration for my design, keeping it simple and elegant. Having knowledge of Photoshop I decided to use this software to create the invites, this also gave me great flexibility with the presentation and layering allowing the design to be changed and edited when required. Using our group chat I was able to receive feedback from the team, helping me to make amendments when needed. In the final stages of the design process, the team decided they wanted to use a different design for the invitations. Although, I was not able to use my design for the exhibition, the process helped me improve my design skills and develop my Photoshop knowledge.

When planning the exhibition I learnt how important connections are to putting on a successful event. An example of this being, how I successfully booked a photographer free of charge for the event. As I am a member of a local photography club, I was able to talk to other photographers about the event, increasing promotion. After discussing the possibility of having a photographer to photograph the exhibition with the club, I was able to book a photographer for the evening with no charge and lots of interest.

Working as a team as well as independently I was able to improve on my own skills and gain more knowledge of the preparation and running of an exhibition.