Julie Cockburn is a English photographer she lives and works in England. She studied at Chelsea college of art and central st martins college of art and design. Her work is unique in the sense that she takes found photographs and through cutting, embroidering and collaging makes them her own.There isnt much information on her, herself but i suppose this is because she prefers to keep her personal experiences and private life to herself. However for this information i used her website below.
This Photograph is called 'Tattoo face' and was made in 2010 this piece relates to her theme as it looks like a found photograph and it has been tampered with in the sense that it has embroidery on the face.This photograph is different however as it is in colour which suggest that it cant be a really old photograph as digital cameras weren't invented and neither would be colour prints. So the fact that this piece is coloured and not black and white suggests that it is a fairly contemporary photograph.
The subject matter in this frame is a young woman who appears to be smiling, she wears a polka dotted shirt which looks formal and her hair is out short and slick.
Her lipstick is a bright red colour which is similar to the 1920s lipstick fashion trend which could hint that this photograph could be from that era.However like i mentioned before colour photography wouldn't have been invented yet so this photography would be impossible to have been taken then.
This photograph in its natural form is very similar to a 1950s commerical for example this one below the sarcastic expression on this models face is very similar to the sarcastic smile on Julie cock burns image.The models are also similar looking in the sense they both look of British orgin and have brown hair in similar styles.
To create this piece Julie Cockburn used a embroidery technique to sow inside this image creating a cool pattern, the embroidery on the face is very detailed and looks like it took a long time to create.The background of this image also looks collaged with pieces of blue tissue paper the colour blue is used alot in this piece which is probably why Julie decided to use blue thread to thread this design on this models face.This piece would have taken a while to complete because of the finery in the face which would have required a thin needle.
The Phrase 'Tattoe face' refers to the action of having tattoes all on your face which alot of people see as a deviant act and the people who do this to themselves often are wild, rebellious people and maybe using all of the information I've gathered about the similarity between this and a 1950 commerical this is what she was trying to convey in the act of how she stylised her image.The meaning behind it could be that comericals like this one make women seem like housewives passive and obedient to their husbands by embroidering the woman's face Julie is making a statement that women can be rebellious and wild as well and aren't passive human beings
I think in my opinion that Julie Cockburn is a artist instead of a photographer because she relies on secondary imagery she doesn't take the pictures herself. For example this idea is similar to the Rankin destroy project whereby Rankin took photographs of celebrities and encouraged them to recreate them using what ever they wanted to display traits of who they are and what they think of themselves.
In a similar way Julie has taken these found photographs and recreated them as her own the only difference being Julie doesn't necessarily know the people in these photographs and these photographs aren't actually captured by Julie.
This is why i would say she is more of a artist than a photographer as shes only designing the already taken photographs in some respect shes taking credit for somebody else's work or bringing somebody else's work back to life.
This piece amazes me that someone can put that much time and effort into designing this piece,However, id be more impressed if there was some sort of historical background on each of the people in the subject matter she chooses to work on for example a photograph of the second world war which shows nurses helping soldiers, if Julie were to recreate and stylise this by maybe creating halos around the nurses heads to show how much help they were that way that end photograph would have meaning and historical relevance.
No comments:
Post a Comment