Researching

Richard Avedon has a very unique style of working. His portraits are very interesting and seem to tell stories and spark ideas very quickly. Avedon (1923-2004) was an American photographer born in New York City. Avedon did not conform with the standard technique of taking fashion portraits with motionless models but in fact changed the concept and photographed the women smiling and full of emotion and often in action also. In addition to fashion Avedon also branched out and photographed patients of mental hospitals, protesters of the Vietnam war and also the fall of the Berlin Wall. Avedon photographed many famous people and liked to get an emotional response when taking the photo so often got into awkward discussions or asked psychological questions.


This image is very interesting, it is of a man named Ronald Fischer taken in 1981. He was a bee keeper and caught Avedons eye so he photographed him. The image is very intimate as the man is bearing all. As well as this it is noticeable that the bee's could in fact be stinging him but the emotion on his face does not tell us whats happening.


The images below are from a collection of images by Avedon, where he went out to capture the people that had 'hard uncelebrated jobs who are often ignored or overlooked'. The guy below is Roberto Lopez an oil field worker and next to him is Charlene van tighem a psychological therapist. The two images are very striking and I think they both stand alone or together really well. The fact that they are in black and white enhances features such as the eyes and the figure of the woman.













This image is one of the most interesting of the whole collection. This man is Richard Garber a Drifter from Utah. On a website I found a commentary from Avedons assistant Laura Wilson. She explains how Avedon and herself met this man in a cafe where he was in a very sorry state, crying and talking to himself. They heard of his plight, of his car being impounded and his mother being taken into a mental intuition. Then followed the photograph in front of the simple white background.


The style of the images is plain yet effective to the viewer. They clearly show the plight of these people yet are still very stylish with the professional way in which the photo's are taken on white background with probably some sort of studio set up or extra lighting.

Extra Ideas

I have done some more research with the soliloquy theme in mind along my idea of portraits which was in an early post with the celebrities. I have found this image of Marilyn Monroe by Bert Stern. I think the image has high significance to both the project at the moment and the idea of portraits.



The image was in a gallery exhibition by Stern at the National Gallery and the idea was that the pictures displayed were the ones that he crossed out when choosing which ones to print. I think the image is very interesting considering it was taken very close to Marylin Monroe's death also. The bright yellow colour draws in the eye of the onlooker and brings you into the photo. The redness of her lips also signify sexual connotations.

I have found a quote from Macbeth 'fair is foul and foul is fair'. The dictionary quote of foul is 'grossly offensive to the senses, disgustingly loathsome' I think this particularly could go with Marilyn Monroe as at the time she was one of the most famous women in America, most probably loathed by women everywhere!



I edited the image in photoshop by first photographing some text then adding onto my image using the magic wand tool to get rid of the white background and adding onto the image.

I have edited my image and included this newspaper style text. I think it works well as she died soon after this image could be some sort of newspaper report on her life, or even a death threat. This experiment is a good variation on the other as the text and overall composition has completely changed.

This is my final image in the soliloquy style. I wrote out the text in my own handwriting, then photograhed it and transferred it over to photoshop. I wanted to create an image that showed a sense of closure as Monroe's death was closely after the image was taken, as said before. Using the text 4 times and joining it up, creates a border type layer on top of the image.

Even more expansion on Soliloquy

Guy Bourdin was a revolutionary photographer during the 1950's to the 1980's. He was a pioneer in creating distinct fashion images. His images were sensual, sexual, surreal and sometimes slightly sinister, however since his death (1991) he has been hailed one of the most influential fashion photographers of all time.







These images again like Duane Michals are very intimate. However all the images here are in bright and even perhaps slightly gaudy colours. The colour in the images displays different emotions for example in the first image we see the green engulfs most of the image which could signify envy against the women looking back in the mirror. Image two shows a light blue colour which could be a calming colour as the woman is asleep. Image three again has the green with the red which could show the tension between the woman and the man who is smoking beneath her. The final image is a bright pink with red colour which could signify passion and sex. We can see the woman's bottom on show however we also see a light pink elephant above the bed which seems to bring some sort of innocence to the image. All the images don't actually show a person straight on and its only sides of the body or parts such as images three and four. All the images are studio styled images being contrived by the photographer which created a slightly uneasy feel to the image knowing that someone has planned this type of image, making Michals quite controversial.


Another photographer that photographed groundbreaking images was Helmut Newton. He also worked around the time of Guy Bourdin in the fashion industry however added many of his new ideas to change the industry.



This image is of particular interest as the woman sitting down is in fact Newton's wife. The image has a superb composition as the subjects elbow directs the eye straight towards the wife. Also there is some humour in the image with the boredom on the wife's face and also the trench coat worn by Newton which is rather strange. Also the legs that are protruding from the left side of the image, they have no clear body attached. The studio set up is a classic one and photographing an ideal studio set up and creating an image from it makes the photograph much more playful yet still quite revealing of the photographer himself and different.

Expanding Ideas for Soliloquy

I have started looking at some other artists and photographers to try and relate my work and some of the soliloquy texts to. One of the photographers I was most intrigued in was Duane Michals.

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These images are particularly interesting as they show some inner depth to the people in them.

Picture 1 is very bare and intimate and it shows all that is personal to a man. This image relates well to the 'If it were done when 'tis done' soliloquy by Macbeth from Macbeth- 'will plead like angels trumpet tongued against the deep damnation of his taking off and pity like a naked new born babe.' In the image we see an empty room with a lone man stripping naked inside which could just simply be him getting ready for bed however with the low tone of the image it seems like he is resisting something and of course for a photograph to be taken here requires a lot of trust. Composition wise, it is very mininal with only himself, adding to the personal feel and also the black and white gives a sense of isolation to the image.

Image 2 is a brighter image, although still in black and white, it has just the one man with the mirrors. These sort of pictures lead the eye into a puzzle as you are never really sure how many mirrors there are or where they are situated in regards to the subject. The man crossing his arm over his chest up onto his chin seems to show he is aware of the presence and does not want everything to be seen. I think this image relates really well to ' is this a dagger which I see before me' by Macbeth from Macbeth. He believes a dagger has just been put through his body however it has not killed him. 'I have thee not yet I see thee still, art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feelings as to sight?' I think image 2 relates well to this quote as the man looking into the mirrors may just be a ghost as we never really see his full body outside of the mirror.

Image 3 is my favourite out of the 3 images. The woman is clearly very beautiful but she vanishes in the mirror. I think this image relates well to the soliloquy by Lady Macbeth in Macbeth- 'stop up the access and passage to remorse that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose nor keep peace between the affect and it!' Lady Macbeth is sacrificing herself to evil and is letting the spirits take over her body. The woman in image 3 seems to be searching for herself in the mirror however she can never see her full face as it is morphed around the mirror. Again composition wise, the woman is alone, however the image is very full with multiple images being put together making it interesting to look at and it seems to have a feeling of progression through the images.

Soliloquy

The new theme for this year is soliloquy. 'An act of speaking ones thoughts aloud when by oneself or regardless or any hearers especially by a character in a play', oxford dictionary.

Having just had a talk from an English teacher many ideas have started flowing already. We looked especially at 'Macbeth' and 'A Midsummer nights dream' both by Shakespeare. I in particular liked the line from Helena's soliloquy 'love looks not with the eyes but with the mind'.
My first stop was google and I typed in the line and came up with some literary analysis. One of which was from the SparkNotes website 'love depends not on an objective assessment of appearance but rather on an individual perception of the beloved.'

I decided from here that I really liked the idea of the eyes and telling a story with eyes.

I looked for some images of famous people in close up images with just their eyes or part of their faces.

I think these images all show something very different, however the similarity in the images is that the background to all the images is very neutral and its blurred out. All the images tell some sort of inside story of the face it is from. I find them very interesting and I want to try and re create these images as a starting point for the project as this concept of eyes really fascinates me. I am interested in the fashion side to photography and being celebrities these images have obviously been very clearly derived from an idea to show these particular women off in different ways. The setting of the images is very studio like and not natural in style and the expressions they all give also seem very posed.

A Self Portrait

In class we looked at the work of JR, a photographer that found maximum opportunities to enhance his creativity. He was self taught and travelled the world trying to send messages with his art work. Over time he created as project called 'insideout project'. Within this project he went to third world countries like India into the shanty towns and tried to create something special. One of his projects was to show the people of the shanty town to the outside world. JR photographed the eyes of the people and pasted them onto the roofs and walls of their houses.

Our task was to go home and photograph ourselves, so a self portrait, which shows our real personality, with different tones, contrasts and shapes to maximise our creativity. For my image I decided to take it in black and white, with a black backdrop behind me.

I think this image displays me as a person in my full light! The facial feautures as well defined by the low lighting but definitely capture the style I was looking to get. The use of the studio set up here has enabled me to work with the lighting to create a particular look that I would not have got in my bedroom normally. This in turn has enhanced the image as a whole and gives it more of a professional feel.

Initial Ideas.. A new bench mark

This is the theme for the summer task and I thought long and hard about how I could begin this assignment. I wanted to do something that was quirky and funny because a lot of my recent work has been quite emotive in sad ways. I decided that I would like to photograph multiple people sitting on the bench in funny positions. I did think about this more and decided that I should probably broaden the idea slightly. I firstly did some research into what other photographers had created before with the idea of benches or seats.






These two images are very similar and very different for many reasons. One obvious similarity is that they both have people sitting on a bench. However the biggest difference is probably the style of the clothing worn and also the backdrop for each image. The first show three respectable gentlemen probably sitting in the park, reading the daily paper. The second shows two women I believe however it is difficult to tell. Facing away from the camera looking out onto a market. From these pictures I continued looking for other to inspire me and set off some sort of starting point. I then found this image.



I found this image on google after searching interesting chairs into the search bar and this started an idea. From there I came up with the hat idea. I liked the idea of different hats telling a story and this would be Incorporated into the bench idea. I took my sister down to the local park and asked her to model some hats for me whilst sitting on the bench. She was making her mark on the bench by wearing these different hats. The different hats made her different people with ,in theory, different occupations so probably different personalities.

The experiment did not go as well as I had expected. I thought the images would be a lot more striking and have a bigger story to tell but they seemed quite bland and safe. However I do think there is an element of quirkiness in them and they are quite comical. To develop the images further I think I need to focus on editing them in photoshop to create something from they images I have to make it more worth while.
For my next experiment I want to broaden the idea of different personalities on the benches and I also want to incorporate the theme of fashion into the images, which I think will make them appeal to a wider audience. I think that using a studio setting may have been more beneficial to my images as I could have had full control over the lighting and setting created and used.