Evaluation Of Personal Project.

The theme for this project was ‘Personal Project’. I have interpreted the theme by creating my own theme of Depression; I’ve reflected my contemporary research findings in this work by using artist Barbara Kruger for inspiration.

To begin with I drew out a large mind map in my sketchbook, as my chosen pathway was portraiture I came up with ideas that expressed this best.

I then decreased all of the sketchy ideas to 4 main ideas to which my themes were relationships, loneliness /Isolation, Distortion and Mood changes. However I soon dropped Mood changes as an idea and just developed the others.

To get inspiration for these ideas I looked up photographers that expressed these themes in their artwork, amongst whom I found Jamie Diamond, Richard Vantielcke and Thomas Jackson, Each of these photographers had very different ideas about each of my themes and I adored the way they perceived them.

Jamie Diamond was expressing the relationship between mother and child and used her relationship with her mother to recreate this using a plastic toy dolly, which she took to various locations and photographed it.

Richard Vantielcke who expressed isolation and alienation from others by being different and did this by placing a cardboard box on his head and walking around taking photographs, which illustrated a story.

Thomas Jackson who used science fiction and literature to create a darkly humorous narrative about a lonely robot's failure to exist with the natural world.

After analyzing these artists I decided to produce a Pinterest mood board again displaying my three themes in different exciting ways.

Whilst looking on Pinterest I found loads of images that depicted my themes differently from slow shutter speeds for distortion to candid shots of romance for relationships.

After these I looked at artists Andy Warhol and Miles Donovan and adopted their style to produce artworks with my first photo-shoot.

My first photo-shoot was images of people on the train I did this to convey the relationships between strangers and they were in sort of a time lapse of as one person gets on the train they might leave after a while or someone that is sitting on the train might gain a person. I used these images to create a Miles Donovan and Andy Warhol inspired piece-using Photoshop.

After this I took more photographs for my second theme distortion however I took these images at multiple viewpoints so that after I could construct little creations which is just what I did. With my first viewpoint images I produced a David Hockney style artwork, which made my models, face larger than his body, which was very effective for my them. Secondly with the multiple viewpoint images I produced a GIF of a model pulling on her face distorting it out of shape.

Then, I decided to conduct a third photo-shoot depicting my third theme of Loneliness/Isolation and these worked particularly well I had images of my model sitting on a bench playing a guitar and I also incorporated the distortion theme into the photo-shoot by producing images where my model shook his head on a slow shutter speed. After taking these photographs I wanted to improve the quality of them and imported them into Photoshop to manipulate them.

Soon after I took a trip to The Photographers Gallery to look at the exhibition Home truths which overall I found disturbing by informative. Then after reviewing my ideas in a essay style in my sketchbook I decided to take the idea of loneliness and take it to the next level by researching what type of illnesses it can be a symptom of in which I found depression.

After choosing this final theme I captured another photo-shoot trying out the very simple poses to convey this and after manipulating them I researched artist Barbara Kruger.

Barbara Kruger is famously known for her typography on found images, she uses quotes which question feminism, consumerism and classicism. Her bold lettering is produced by using a etching technique whereby she carves the letters into a metal plate and runs this through a etching machine.

I really liked her style and decided to incorporate her style into my final piece by producing 6 GIFS based on photographs I took in my final Depression themed photo-shoot. Although I am highly influenced by Barbara Kruger I wanted my piece to be more personal and not a copy of her work, which is why I changed certain aspects of her context, design and technique when creating my piece.

Each GIF portrayed something different from challenging common stereotypes people have of people suffering from depression to bringing out the subconscious of someone suffering from depression (taken from the NHS website) and factual information about depression also taken from the NHS website. I wanted these Gifs to be very flashy and quick to make the reader consume the information that is being given to them at first glance.

Although to improve my final piece I should have maybe used different models for the different photographs instead of the same model in each print this would make the text relate to the individual featured more.

Also, I could have perhaps personalized each image before putting the bold lettering on them as I only did this for a few of my images.

To create the Barbara Kruger lettering on my photographs I opted for a personalized way instead of using a etching technique, So to create this effect I first painted a piece of paper red and then cut strips from it and this was my base for my newspaper letters. The process of my final piece required a high attention span and sharp eyes as I had to manually search for the letters I needed though newspapers and this proved difficult when not all my required letters were there.

Overall I am Very pleased with my Final coursework outcome, a lot of hard work and research went into it as well as a lot of experimental photo shoots. I think my final outcome was really successful I accomplished what I set out to do and in the end it looked even better than I thought it would so for me that’s a accomplishment in itself.