Personal Project: 3 Relating Artists

My theme portraiture covers a lot of ideas i've researched some other Photographers that i haven't used before that explore this theme in different styles and ways and amongst who i found:

JAMIE DIAMOND

Jamie is a Contemporary photographer who questions notions of identity, intimacy, and reality in her pieces. She uses role play and constructs events and objects for the camera to capture. The project that most interested me is a project called 'I promise to be a good mother'. In this project Jamie has assumed the role of motherhood and tried to create this image of a 'good' mother using a doll. She got the idea from looking throughout old diaries which she had documented memories as a child and with this project she has tried to bring these memories to life by acting out recalled events and behaviours. Her clothes and style in this are also part of her memory she has dressed up using her mothers old clothes and tried to recreate this look on herself. I really like this idea and how she has explored it with something quite peculiar as a doll visiting real locations and displaying realistic emotion it makes the viewer forget that this small baby is in-fact a toy.

Her acting skills are also faultless the emotion captured on her face reemphasis's this love she has for this baby and the locations she visits such as museums parks eat into this vision of a 'good' mother taking their child on educational and informative trips.
The meaning behind this piece is very open but considering the context i think she is trying to say that her mother was a good mother.

RICHARD VANTIELCKE

Richard Vantielcke is a french photographer on his website he defines himself as a guardian of the legacy of surrealist painter Rene Magritte. His photography is a great range he has prints of  urban architecture, conceptual photography or portrait and self-portrait photography. Although my chosen pathway is portraiture i took particular interest into his Conceptual Narrative Photography.
It was his project labelled box head which is a fictional narrative of a man becoming intrigued by a box and amongst looking inside he is transformed into this box head.The photographs show us him on his travels going to various locations and the sequence ends with him laying on the ground amongst other boxes. This project is buzzing with meaning and this is perhaps why i like it so much by making a man that is in essential different from society and by placing it this way it explores alienation and isolation in society which is recognisable issue.

His use of locations are very effective to emphasise the theme of isolation and alienation.It really reflects the idea that society is so comfortable with what we consider the norm and people who are deviant or go against this norm are considered misfits and a disruption or danger to this equilibrium.

THOMAS JACKSON

Thomas Jackson is a American photographer who spent much of his career in New York as an editor and book reviewer for magazines. It was here his interest in photography books led him to pick up a camera.  He first began by first shooting Garry Winogrand-inspired street scenes, then landscapes, and finally installation works. His work has been shown at The Center for Book Arts in New York, the Governors Island Art Fair, the Gallery at Eponymy in Brooklyn and Industria Superstudios in New York. One particular installation I'm most interested with even thought it isn't portraiture per say is his narrative robot series.

In this series of photographs, he has  combined elements of science fiction literature and film  to create a darkly humorous narrative about a lonely robot’s failure to exist with the natural world. On his website he goes on to say ' the work also explores the  opposing emotions Mother Nature provokes in us: fear and fascination,  attraction,  greed, guilt and the queasy feeling that in the end, she will get us back for everything we’ve done wrong. I chose to build the series around a robot because he seemed an apt representation of our otherness within the natural world, and a stand-in for our ceaseless desire to force our environment into permanent submission—no matter how doomed the effort might be'.

I love how Thomas has structured his scenes to display a theme of loneliness like the image above with the robot playing a normally two or more players game by himself. There are also combined elements of light painting with the image which are really effective to this narrative piece.I think the best thing about this photography is the technical creative aspect to it, thomas created this robot and it should be admired as much as the photograph as a piece of art. This robot lacks emotion with not facial parts its impossible for it to convey emotion throughout its facial expressions however thomas finds another way to communicate the robots emotions through the scenes and the photographic elements for example the photo where the robot was seen hugging the tree portrays sadness, the robot feels so isolated he takes comfort in natural substances.
I think the meaning of this piece is quite complex to understand and instead of understanding its concept viewers might see a lonely robot who eventually dies as this isn't a world for him.

These are my three influential Photographers they all focus on photography that illustrates a idea or a issue all three of these do this well and to add to this they also document this in a story like way which is something id like to expand on in my work. These artists actually relate to my exam piece outcome last year where i looked at domestic abuse and documented this. I think with this pathway portraiture i will again adopt the Conceptual Narrative side to it and produce a final coursework piece which reflects this.

Personal Project Essay Structure

This is a visual attempt to structure my Photography essay, My essay will potentially be the Change from Analogue portraiture to Modern Digitalised and Mixed media Portraiture and for this i will look into and analyse photographers such as Julie Cockburn, Man ray and many others.

Below is the two structure layouts for my essay. Ive structured this as if this paper is a gallery or museum floor plan and each of my paragraphs are sectioned into different rooms. For my first composition i sectioned my rooms by artist and my second composition was sectioned into into techniques. I think out of the two i will most likely go with the artist structure as its more fluent to write without getting to muddled up.

Personal study essay: Intital Ideas

Final Piece Idea and Lee Jeffries Analysis

For he Summer Assignment I looked at a photographer named Jill Greenberg, She did a series of Photographs of crying children and to get this effect her method was to give the child a sweet and then cruelly remove of it. These images possess a great amount of emotion and with that detail.
So I wanted to take this idea of emotion and make it my own. Which is when I stumbled across the Photographer Lee Jeffries's SLR portrait Photography.



Lee Jeffries is a Photographer that lives in Manchester, He grew close to the football circle and then began photographing sporting events. The portraits that intrigued me the most were a selection of black and white photographs of homeless people.

 This idea of his came about when he met a young homeless girl by chance in the streets of London, he recalls that, initially, he had stolen a Candid shot from the girl huddled in a sleeping bag. Jeffries knew that the young girl had noticed him but he says that something made him stay and go and speak with the homeless girl. It was here when his perception about the homeless completely changed.
They became the subject of his art. He states in a interview that Situations arose, and I made an effort to learn to get to know each of the subjects before asking their permission to do their portrait. The models in his photographs are homeless people that he has met on his travels in Europe and the United States.

Although the emotion from photographing homeless people almost should be or seems to be saddening, Lee Jeffries has portrayed these people in a different light, with his high contrast images he has enabled us to look at these people as we would look at any other person, I don't think he wants us to pity these models but honor them by looking at their likeliness in a different meaning.

All of Lee's Images are labeled with the name of the model in which is in the photograph. However since I obtained this image from Google it doesn't have this caption attached to it. So the name is unknown. I think to produce this image Lee used a digital camera maybe a canon because of the clarity and detail captured I also think he manipulated his images by using photo shop to change the original colour to black and white and then enhance the image to produce this high contrast image as the end result.

The name of the subject of this photo is unknown however we do know that he is homeless and we can also gather than he is a elderly man. The use of light in this picture is really well done, the reflected light is visible in the glasses of this old man and it also highlights his hair.
But despite all we are drawn to the figures eyes in this piece innocent, honest looking eyes.These eyes also look scared or worried because of the watery tint in them.
These emotions portrayed by the eyes is what id like my final piece to have, id want the viewer to be able to tell a story by looking at the models eyes.

 

This is another image by Lee for me I think this is a really powerful image it really captures this man in his natural appearance it seems. Its also powerful because we can connotate that this man is blind and unwell hence the musus secreting from his nose but despite all he still puts on a honest face and sits their begging for small change. Its like Lee's series of homeless people represent average working class people some of lee's models are blind, smoke, wear glasses but because they are homeless they are to be pitied, No! by showing us these people Lee in a way is reminding us that Homeless people are still ordinary people they aren't objects they hurt and feel the same as everyone else does.

 

 

So for my final piece inspired by Jill Greenberg and Lee Jeffries I will do a series of portraits conveying different emotions.