Evaluation of Prep Work

My ideas have changed allot over the course of the project from wanting to do something simple as hidden identity and candid photography ive developed my ideas to exploring the hardship and sensitivity of my final outcome theme Domestic Violence.My Final outcome reflects the exam theme 'Covert and Obscured' Because of this whole idea of living a personal and exclusive life no one truly knows or understand what goes on behind closed doors we close our doors to Obscure the world from our personal and individuality lives.
The photographer that inspired my work in the end has to be a cross between Rankin and Sally Mann because abit of my final piece is all about looking into the life of this young girl who is being abused and exploiting personal lives is more  Sally mann's style. Other parts of my final piece where i have sown into my pictures have been inspired by the Rankin destroy project but instead of destroying the picture to convey her personality i'm destroying the picture to convey her struggle hurt and finally desperation.
The different experiments we did throughout the year got me comfortable with the experiments and allowed me to make a few experimentation of my own.I did many darkroom technique such as inserting a shape to the image, Overexposing and underexposing to get the print a certain vintage look,handmade negatives.I also did quite a few experimentation's outside of the darkroom such as tamper-age with the print like cutting, weaving, sowing,and collaging. 
Overall i found the project fun a well as interesting the exam theme was slightly difficult to come up with a range of different ideas at first because of the formally of the words but then after breaking down the meaning and looking through a thesauri ideas began to come to me.Honesty i think i will be very pleased about my final outcome because i know that alot of practice and hardworking went into creating it to the quality that it is.

My ideas have been strongly influenced by Matt Winiewski and Sally Mann. Matt because of his ability to obscure portraiture with nature such as trees and the sea and Sally Mann because of the way she almost intrudes into her families personal life and capture images that would of otherwise been unknown to the human eye.
The trip to the exhibitions inspired my work in a sense they reminded me that in order to get a good photograph you've got to enjoy taking it or find a interesting subject matter and capture it in your best interests.For example In the Juergen teller exhibition he had pictures of his children these weren't posed shots he didn't pend money and time into getting the child in the right position no, these are candid pure shots of life as they happen.


The handmade negatives experimentation was my favorite experimentation because i love the effect a bit of Vaseline and salt can do to a picture it completely transformed it as well as obscures its natural form.The experiment that influenced my final piece most was the out of the darkroom techniques such as the owing and weaving of the prints.

Sigmar Polke Analysis

Polke was Born in 1941 he studied from 1961 to 1967 at the Düsseldorf Art Academy where he helped launch an art movement known as Capitalist Realism, which mined popular culture and advertising for its pictorial language.He first took up photography in the 1960s using a handheld 35mm Leica camera. The  camera with a silent shutter gave him the ability to record "found" still lives quickly.

Polke also began to experiment with printing techniques in the darkroom to transform the raw material of his negatives through the process of photochemistry.

In this print he has combined both overexposed and underexposed prints together as well as positive and negative printing to create as he called 'enigmatic narratives' whereby the viewer draws up his/hers own questions about the piece.The combination of the curtains a blacked out figure and a silhouette of a  hand creates mystery and suspense about what is actually happening in this shot.

At times Polke placed two negatives in the enlarger to introduce context and narrative into the final layered image. In this image, he used double exposure to embed shoppers carrying umbrellas  and a photography that looks like a shower to illustrate to the audience that the story of this was to show shoppers carrying umbrellas as they navigate a flooded street. My first reaction to this piece was that it looked complicating and confusing but when i actually analysed it a little more I began to pull out the meaning of it.

Polke also taught himself to develop his own negatives and enlarge prints. From the beginning, he viewed the darkroom as an arena for developing prints and experimentation and seeing images emerge led him to disregard standard procedures that determine the length of time a print is to remain in each chemical bath and the sequence of those baths. He made up his own "rules" of the darkroom which often resulted in scratched negatives, under- and overexposures, and prints that further obscured details to create visually disorienting compositions.

 This photograph is of two skeletons leaning against a wall. One has a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and the other stares out of the corner of his eye socket at him, although they are both deceased they look at each other as if they are sharing a joke. The yellowy paper suggests this photograph is very old what's interesting about this piece is that the skeleton on the left appears much lighter that the one on the right this can suggest many things for example because the skeleton on the left is holding a cigarette this could suggest this was the cause of his death which would explain why his bones look rotten, another reason could be simply that the skeleton on the left has only been decreased for a little while whilst the other has been gone a long time.The lighting in this looks like it could just be natural daylight as there is a miniature shadow over the left skeleton.The background space resembles stone, but the hunched shoulders of the figures suggests they are sitting down.I think this piece was a organised photo shoot as skeletons are normally buried underground so for this piece i think sigmar dressed up the skeletons this way deliberately to make it look like a candid shot. This piece ha inspired me to play around with surrealism when creating photo shoots and to go with something strange and unusual.

Outcome Presentation Methods

This is my visual and text related mind map for ways of presenting my final outcome.

For my final outcome I've decided that i want to do a awareness poster informing people of domestic abuse I've chosen this idea because i think it relates closely to my them and is relevant for example you wouldn't necessarily have a picture of someone being abused on a fashion item handbag because that would seem as if you were promoting domestic abuse.
So for my final piece i will choose my  two strongest images and create a large double exposure print on large paper, I will use tracing paper and print out a slogan and a header for my piece, I aim for it to be about a A3 sheet of photographic paper and I want to window mount this.

Digital Prints for my final idea.

These are some of my digital responses to my final idea,In this picture i have transformed it from coloured to black and white and used the burn tool on photoshop to give the subject a bruised eye.In my print photographs i will have used makeup around my subjects eye to give them a beaten up look.

This is a second digital example of what will be on my final film,For this picture i again transformed it into black and white and again used the burn tool to give her a bruised eye but then i added in a secondary sourced hand and transformed it to make it look as if it was covering her mouth.  To do this in the darkroom i'd do a photogram styled print so expose my portrait of my subject and then place my hand in the way of the light so they my hand will be silhouetted onto the print.

In Depth Review Of Ideas

To come up with my final idea i first developed a range of ideas evidently on my blog my first idea was 'Costume make up' for this i would look at how some people hide behind the makeup they put on their skin and how this obscures their natural beauty. My second idea was costumes and how a costume like for example a spiderman costume can let your alter ego out and obscure your personality.Another one of my ideas were shadows and how these are covert and secret looking for example in a lot of crime-fiction programmes the suspect is represented by a shadow to conceal their true identity.Then my main potential idea was 'Hidden identity' i wanted to explore this in a wide range by for example making my models wear items on theirs heads such as bags or hoodies that cover their face to obscure their identity , i wanted to do a bit of distortion as well and make my models faces appear weird and abnormal.I was also planning on using the doge and burn technique in the darkroom to make my models appear darker and hard to make out in the photograph. However after looking deeper into this idea i discovered that i had gone for the easy interruption of the theme 'Covert and Obscured' therefore i began to think about a new idea.

For my final piece I'm going to do a piece on Domestic Abuse. I've chosen this idea because a person that is being abused isn't always obvious to notice, in fact most people who are being abused hide it behind fake smiles. I want to do a bit of narrative photography into the life of someone who's being abused and show how they obscure all of this behind there fake smile and the consequence's of them saying silent about this issue or maybe change this into a awareness campaign and create a poster for my final piece.
Im going to use the double negative technique for this idea, i will take two photographs one of my model with a fake smile on and one of them with a abused face and ill merge these together to see the contrast between them. I enjoyed this technique because you can add it to other techniques as well such as the handmade negative technique which i also enjoys and together it gives a photograph a complicated but interesting look.

For example this print was made by combining the double exposure technique with the handmade negative technique.If i was to spot this to my now theme i think it would look really good depending on which photograph i choose.

To support my piece i will research into trusted campaigns such as the NSPCC and Woman's AID as well as the NHS to draw inspiration from and also to draw facts and figures for this piece.

One strong Artist that i will look at for this will be Sally Mann most of her photography is a up close and personal in site into her family or families lives. This image below demonstrates my idea very well.

This image looks like this child has been being abused and i will sort of go for the opposite with this piece as I'm kind of doing this like a awareness campaign whereby I'm trying to convey to the audience or viewers of my work that you can't normally just look at someone and know all the ups and downs of there lives, Frankly you just don't know what happens behind closed doors of that persons live. 

The fact that the final outcome will be in black and white i think is very effective and if i get the lighting right for my scenes ill have some really good shots.

These images were photography's by Rankin, This was a campaign to ask everyone to act until women and children are safe’– that is - aadmit domestic abuse is a problem, call it by its name and talk to someone about it .The campaign uses head and shoulder portraits of famous female faces, made up to show the physical effects of domestic violence.  

The bruises on these women are fake but the picture leaves a strong message to its intended audience.

\

Darkroom Experiments

These are dome of the Darkroom experiments i carried out.

This is a handmade negative, i made this by cutting a small piece of acetate the size of a negative so it could fit inside the carrier.I then placed some Vaseline and table salt on top of the plastic layer and exposed it for approximately 6 seconds.

This is a handmade negative combined with two of my own negatives. I did the exact same thing with my handmade negative but before placing it inside the negative carrier i placed my two negatives down firs, this way the Vaseline and salt wouldn't spoil my own negatives.I like this photograph because its quite illusive in the sense that you cant tell which image is the original.

This print was made with a handmade and my own negative combined,To do this i placed the acetate on top of my negative and carefully stylised where i wanted the salt and Vaseline to be placed.I chose to obscure the face in this piece because i was working on the theme of 'Hidden identity' and i thought by covering the face this idea works quite well.

This is a photography from my first film. It features my model covered in a white sheet with a wig and necklace placed on top for added character. Again i chose to place the Vaseline and salt around the figure to give it a ghostly sense since my chosen theme at the time was 'Hidden identity'.

This photograph is from the photography trip, to do this effect i cut out a x shape from a piece of black card and kept the cut out pieces.I then placed the black card over my photographic paper with the cut out x in my desired place and exposed my picture for 6seconds.I then placed the cut out x in the same place and removed the black card (being very careful not to move the paper) i then exposed it for another 6seconds and i was given this outcome.