Dissertation Done

Well, I never knew sitting and typing could be such an difficult situation. Megabus is not the most comfortable place for updating your blog when you can’t actually bend your knee......

So it’s been a while since I last updated this due to being super busy. Friday 12th, I finally handed in my dissertation. I’m so glad its over, but now I have an equally important deadline for 1st March. Greeeat. So I decided to print my dissertation myself, until I ran out of black ink with 10 pages left to print. Pretty annoying because it was a brand new ink cartridge at the beginning but I guess thats what happens when your printing well over a hundred pages of pictures and text. So this was about midnight on thursday night, so me and my housemate decide to go to the library to print the last 10 pages. So off we went, I spent like 20 minutes rearranging everything in word because I use a mac, and I don’t have word for a mac just pages. So I go to print, I print all the black pages fine, but I can’t print the colour ones because the colour printer isn’t working. So friggin annoying. The deadline was 12pm on Friday, so I needed to get in bound and stuff. So this meant only 5 hours sleep..... and I didn’t sleep properly because I was paranoid about over sleeping. Anyway, Friday morning I managed to get the last two pages printed, two copies bound and handed in by 9.50am. Wooo.

On Monday 2nd I went to New York, this trip had been originally planned to celebrate handing in the dissertation. But in the end I got a extension because I found out that I am actually dyslexic, which I have always thought I might have been but I finally got tested this year. So the trip happened the week prior to handing in my dissertation, I was in two minds whether I should have been going or not. Some people had told me not too but either way going or not going would affect my work. I had to take some pictures whilst there for my project. So I landed on Monday afternoon, the first thing I did was going out and buy the glee soundtracks, I had to resist buying the boxset.... different regions and all that jazz... plus they’ve made 9 more episodes so there’s no point really.

On Tuesday I managed to slip in the bathroom, resulting in twisting my knee, then it locked and as I hit the floor the fall forced it to unlock.... there was a lot of crunching noises... fun... So for 2 days I couldn’t walk. FUN. Luckily I had some friends I knew there who looked after me. THANK GOD! So on Thursday I decided that I was going to walk somewhere... as the week went on it got easier to walk on. But it was so much effort and it made me so tired. I couldn’t do everything I wanted to do but I got most of my pictures done. I hope they come out now!

Part of the idea of going out there was to see the person I worked for in the summer, to ask her advice about jobs and ask her some questions for my dissertation. So last summer I worked at two galleries in New York for about 5 weeks. I found the galleries on the Aipad website, this is a website where a lot of the American and some international galleries and dealers advertise. Its sort of like a networking site. I had an amazing time out there, working and just spending that amount of time in the city. I met some amazing people, friends and contacts. I highly recommend work experience, either in your own country or abroad if you can. My main tasks at one of the galleries was to catalog a vast amount of August Sander prints, the person I worked for previously worked for Gerd Sander who is August Sander’s grandson. There still good friends and my understanding is that she has one of the biggest collections of prints in her inventory. Crazy. Other than that I was answering phones calls, protecting books from being stolen by bratty school children, collecting and delivering prints to and from collectors, dealers and photographers to their beautiful galleries or apartments. I have found my future home, doorman and view of central park included. Within the other gallery I did more cataloging of photographs, I helped them set the new gallery space up as they had just moved as well as helping with putting up the new show. Like I said I met some amazing people, for example the critic and maker on the genius of photography series Gerry Badger, I worked for the ex head of photography at Christie's auction house and many gallery owners. One of the biggest surprises was discovering that one of the dealers I worked for represents two ex students from my uni..... Small world.

So that has been my recent life. I’m just heading home for a week to work because I am beyond poor and my bank will start moaning soon if I don’t put any money in my account. Plus I would quite like to have the money to pay my rent next month....... and the next... fun... Plus being at home takes me away from distractions like certain textiles and architecture friends and there bad influences of getting drunk.....

Ugh, coaches make me travel sick.....