Brian Oldham is a twenty-two year old fine art photographer from Southern California, currently living in Los Angeles. I came across Oldham’s photographs when searching for surrealism photographs. One particular photograph, which I wrote about in a previous blog post, really caught my attention and led me to read on and find out more about this photographer. I read a quote from Oldham which I think it a great way to express the art of photography: ‘I make art to replace the words I cannot fathom’. I really like this quote as it is so true in photography as a lot of the time photographers will use the visual arts to show their inner emotions or what they are really feeling. They want to create a visual world and representation of something to make the spectator feel something and to try and to challenge the way we think as a society.

http://brianoldham.format.com/home

I like Oldham’s work as it really makes me think of a dream-like reality and does come under the surrealist photography movement. I like how unique a lot of his photographs are, most of which I have never seen anything like them before. This is what I want my outcomes to look like but I think it will take a bit more time to get my ideas together and to carry on working on this over the summer period.

I find a lot of Oldham’s work very unique and dream-like. These photos make me wonder what is going on and how he managed to do certain things such as the fire on the arms of the male and female, possibly in editing or possibly both of them wearing a special glove in which can take fire. I think that his work is very artistic and really embodies surrealism photography as many spectators may not understand what is going on or why the subject is doing what they are doing. I like how there is not one photo of his that is the same. Each is unique to its own and adds more and more to his work.

This piece of work is entitled ‘Beautiful Lies’ which I think is amazing as it puts focus on an important matter about our earth and what we are doing to it. Manmade objects and large corporate factories adding more and more pollution into the air and ruining our earths most beautiful skies and natural clouds and blue skies. Instead we are faced with polluted grey skies covered in grey manmade clouds. I really like this photograph as it is an environmental movement which is something I feel strongly about and think that we should change in order to keep it alive and to protect the natural world we live in instead of trying to create a corporate jungle filled with skyscrapers and harsh chemicals covering the world’s atmosphere. I like the message Oldham brings behind a lot of his photographs as I think they mean a lot more than just a dream. Maybe he has a dream that one day we will actually see that beautiful blue sky in real life without having to dream about it or visualise it inside our heads.

This image really interests me as I interpret it in two ways. The first way is someone falling out of the sky from the clouds above. They could possibly represent a fallen angel or even someone who has been rejected by the sky. On the other hand, I also see it as someone being taken up to the sky. This could be by aliens, much like you would expect in a dream or as a conspiracy theory. The subject could have been taken from a spiritual being or it could even be magic like something from the Harry Potter films. I really like this as you can interpret it in many ways and you can see different scenarios rather than there just being one clear message and meaning behind the image, it is open for interpretation. I like this work and I want to experiment with different methods of photography like this and to create new unique photographs that haven’t ever been seen before.