Myra greene
Character recognition
The photographer Myra Greene creates portrait images of herself using traditional photographic processes. In the project character recognition she focusses on different parts of her face as a process of recognition and exploration she does this as a protest against the bigoted society that was against her race and how her facial features didn't define her as a person. She creates them with a plate camera, using a slate of glass with chemicals on it, you can see these chemicals running off on the edges of some of her images, increasing the raw feeling of the pictures. My making this work she is intending to voice her opinion on racism by showing everything she may be discriminated for to display her pride in the way she looks.
Here is my response to Myra Greene's work, I did it using the studio lights and by putting the camera very close to the face, you get incredible detail that you wouldn't get in a normal portrait. But by not using the traditional technique that Greene uses the images aren't as striking as her work, for the facial features in her work are emphasised through the way she developed them.
As an extension to this task I photographed a few of my family members in the style of Myra Greene. The main difference between mine and Myra Greene's images is the way in which she heavily edited hers to create the raw black and white feeling of her images, mine on the other hand are reasonably light in comparison to Greene's work.
Lewis Khan
Georgetown
The photographer Lewis Khan explored the theme of portraiture by focusing on one person in depth using film in a creative way to take an interesting approach to portraiture. This film is "Georgetown" in which he follows the interesting character Pat Bennett. He captures Pat or "George" in different ways, such as the fluffy toy's in his room and the writing on his wall, which allow you to learn a lot about him even without hearing him speak. Here is the film:
Georgetown from lewis khan on Vimeo.
Georgetown Continuation
Carrying on using the influences I have gained from Myra Greene and Lewis Khan I moved on to my next set of work. Similar to the style of Georgetown I decided to photograph only two subjects throughout several days, these two subjects were my brothers, Otis and Robert, here they are.
Something that I noticed when looking through my initial shots was that in most of the pictures Robert was wearing a hat with a light blue band round it and Otis was frequently wearing a black parka with a fur bit on the rim of the hood. I thought that if I used only the pictures with these pieces of clothing it would make the images and subjects more easy to spot.
As you can see above I have chosen all of the images with my brothers wearing the pieces of clothing I described above. I also decided to use all of the images when they are facing away from the camera because I thought it looked a lot more natural because they wouldn't have known I was taking the picture until they heard the shutter. Make comparisons between your work and Lewis Khan's.
Genetic portrait
Ulric Collette
Ulric Collette is a french photographer who gets portraits of two family members and uses photoshop to merge the faces together showing how similar family members are although you may not realise it. In some way the merging of the two faces makes it hard to see where one face begins and the other ends. Here are some examples of his work.
Following the tutorial above I created my own merged photo of myself and one of my friends who looks similar to me using the two photos you can see below. I like how the person created by mixing our faces looks reasonably realistic considering the fact that it's two people's faces merged. There were some issues with the merging which I didn't manage to resolve like the area at the top left of the forehead.
The photographic objecT
The next theme of photography we looked at was 'the photographic object'. In this we looked at a photograph in a way other than what it is, by physically changing it to make it into more of a physical piece of art.
At first we did this by creating acetate prints of our own portraits.
At first we did this by creating acetate prints of our own portraits.
Using these acetate prints we took them into the darkroom where I tested a technique of painting on the developer after exposing it which made it so that only the areas exposed to the developer showed the image.
After this we looked at artists such as May Xiong, Lucas Simoes, Joseph Parra, Gerhard Richter and others. These are artists who change photographs into 3-d pieces of art. I then used a3 prints of the same portrait of myself and manipulated them in the style of the different artists. Here are my pieces:
The first image, inspired by Gerhard Richter, did not go so well in my opinion because due to the amount of paint I applied you can't see the image itself. My favourite of the three is the central one due to how well it came out, I did it by placing two portraits on top of each other then cutting slits from the top one and moving them around to create the disjointed effect. In the final image of the three I used a marker pen and a tip ex pen to outline my features, the effect the tip ex pen has was not intended but I think the scraping white has a cool effect, contrasting with the rigorously straight marker pen lines.
THE Photographic object
Gerhard richter
Gerhard Richter is an artist who see's the photograph as not only a medium for displaying art but also as a canvas to create more art. In his series Übermalte Fotografien (Overpainted Photographs) he uses cheap disposable camera images and paints over them using different styles of painting, all changing the photograph from it's original self to a mixture of a photograph and a painting. Here are some examples of this work below.
I have decided to use the work of Gerhard Richter to inspire my final piece. In which I will choose a selection of images to paint over in order to bring another dimention into my work, turning the photograph from a reproducible art form to a 3-d bespoke piece. For my images I decided to use images from a disposable camera which have quite low resolution, similar to those in Richter's work. Here are my final pieces.
In these images I took two separate images of each piece because I believe by adding the paint I turned it from a photograph into a sculpture which you need different angles of to fully take in. I decided to display my photos on the card that I painted them on showing the processes I went through to get the specific effects through the paint.