Sunday
Times case study
... It was the week before Charlie had to hand in his
photography GCSE coursework. He had spent most of that week
hanging round with his mates, skateboarding, smoking “draw”
and getting up late. His parents were at their wits’ end.
Finally, father James snapped.
“I just got the camera and went out in Putney and started
shooting,” he recalls. “I really got into it.” A
high-flying executive who’d always enjoyed art, James read
up on the coursework criteria and systematically started
fulfilling them. He found it easy to justify. “I knew
Charlie was a very talented artist,” he says. “He just
wasn’t up to the deadline.”
GCSE photography involves using a 35mm camera and producing
“three practical assignments supported by research and
underpinning knowledge”. While taking pains that his
supporting research – a written rationale, sketched range
of images, references to other photographers’ work -- was
not wildly superior to Charlie’s as displayed in the
previous control test, James was satisfied that his black
and white visions of traffic and pedestrians in conflict on
Putney streets were up to top GCSE standards.
As indeed they were. The work got an A*. It was just
unfortunate that Charlie came back from a sticky hour
trying to contextualise his work in class to yell that
James had “ruined his life”.
Still, says James smiling bravely, all’s well that ends
well. Charlie is studying art at a top college and earns
money shooting portraits at the weekends. “He learned that
you have to produce,” says James.
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article
Read a revision case
study which also
appeared in the Sunday Times