At the beginning of the A2 year we worked alongside photographer Tom Pope and adopted the idea of performance photography. I really engaged with this and found it so new and exciting, it was so different to anything that we had produced back in the AS course. I did research and one of the movements within performance photography was the idea of surrealism. This was something that I really gripped onto and loved producing this kind of dream-like and unreal work that I was able to produce. It was fun to create new world’s for my spectators to see and enjoy. I took inspirations from young photographers that I hadn’t heard of before including, Christopher McKenney and Brian Oldham. I do really like this style of work and think that I will be incorporating this into my own work again as it was so fun to create and come up with more unique ideas. I also love the genre of dystopian films and find it so interesting to see an imaginary world from the photographer or directors mind come to life. I will incorporate this through my own work too.

Christopher McKenney website: http://www.christophermckenney.com/

Brian Oldham website: http://brianoldham.format.com/home

Further on in the course we started the study of documentary and narrative photography. Throughout the summer I made images of a day out with my friends and also did a shoot around the market community. These shoots were interesting to do and I like the images that I produced but do not want to develop those experiments any further. I learnt a lot with looking at the documentary work of other photographers and found this very interesting, especially the work of Alain Laboile. I do think that I will use the idea of documentary photography by making images of my own personal everyday life while also incorporating different methods of editing like in my own surrealism shoots to make for more interesting images as well as adopting John Baldessari’s method of making the subjects anonymous. I really want my spectator to focus on the general thing that the person/people are doing rather than who they are and their own personal background.

John Baldessari website: http://www.baldessari.org/

Alain Laboile website: http://www.laboile.com/

Reflection | Personal Study

Looking back at the course so far I realised that I did enjoy a lot of it and want to focus in on the idea of surrealism and incorporate it along with tableaux work and how women are represented within our society. I want to further develop these ideas to create a picture story as I find it the most interesting and fun to do and it is also something that I feel strongly about and want to expand my knowledge and research further in that particular area. I think that this will be the most successful as I have previously done work and research on this subject. I feel that I still have a whole lot more to talk about and express through my work on feminism and the way that women are treated within our society. For this I am also going to further develop my research of Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. I like their styles and ways of photographing as well as the meaning that their images hold behind them. I will be making different images and I want to adapt different styles of my visual literacy including taking inspiration from Film Noir and also different techniques from AS with triptych’s, panoramic and doing more studio work. I think that this will make for the best final outcomes and I have an idea of a photo book too or possibly a fashion style magazine that I will also produce.

Claude Cahun work: http://courses.washington.edu/femart/final_project/wordpress/claude-cahun/

Cindy Sherman website: http://www.cindysherman.com/

Barbara Kruger work: http://www.theartstory.org/artist-kruger-barbara.htm