Matt Hawthorne
Matt Hawthorne is a Dallas based photographer who takes fashion, portraiture, action sports and lifestyle images. Hawthorne is trained in fine art photography using large format cameras and film. Hawthorne uses studio lighting in and out of an actual studio to shoot his action images for advertising and fashion jobs. I was inspired by Hawthorne’s work by the studio images with the powder chalk, i think that this would be really interesting to try and recreate these for my personal study, as a sort of advertising campaign. I think that by using chalk in the images it gives a raw feel to the images, and makes them look more ‘sport-like’.
Michael Clark
Michael Clark is an outdoor photographer, whereby he takes images of adventure sports, travel and landscape photography. Clark takes images of sports people pushing themselves to the limit and has also risked his own life to get the most amazing raw images of the sport, for example of rock climbing sport. Clark uses unique angles, dramatic lighting strong graphics in his images which capture the intense moment of the sport itself. Clark’s work has been used for editorial reasons. Clark has been taking photographs since 1996 and in 2003 started to use digital photography. Clark’s images inspired me to try and take some editorial photographs for my personal study whereby i set up the shoots.
Joachim Ladefoged
Joachim Ladefoged has been a professional photographer since 1991, Ladefoged works for editorial clients such as The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazines. February 2008 Ladefoged published a monograph called “Mirror” and in 2009 he directed a short film “Mirror” about bodybuilders. In this series of images he went to bodybuilding competitions and photographed the different competitors, for these images it looks like he used a photo-booth type area to take these images with studio lighting, this is so that the muscles on the bodybuilders are more prominent for the images. This is also why the bodybuilders have had a spray tan before their competition, usually these competitors would of had between 1-3 coats of fake tan so that their muscles are more on show. For my photographers i want to take some images inspired by these, for my images i will not be taking my images of bodybuilders but of younger male gym-goers with a main focus on my main subject but also photographing him and his own friends in their own world. Some of these images i want to recreate as i think that tit would look good to recreate the different set out of images placed together to create a montage sort of images.
Some of the artists that i have chosen are very media based photographs in comparison to Joachim Ladefoged’s images. I think that Ladefoged’s images are more the type of images that i would like to take for my photographs as they are stronger images. For these images i will need to use studio lighting which is not in the gym, so this is what i will have to change in comparison to these images.
For one of my photographs i would like to take an image like this as i think that abs have become and important part of the male physique and especially nowadays for the younger generations as this is what they believe the perfect male to look like, and this is what young boys aspire to look like as they grow up. When going around the gym there is a difference in who is there, nowadays there are younger men going to the gym 6-7 times a week and working to get what they think is the perfect body.
For one of my ideas i want to make a montage image similar to this image, however i do not think my image will include having my subject’s tops off because in the gym you cannot do a work out without your top on.
Ladefoged has a dream of becoming a soccer player, but he couldn’t because he was ‘almost crippled by rheumatism. Rheumatism is ‘any disease marked by inflamation and pain in the joints, muscles, or fibrous tissue’. This is when Ladefoged decided to start taking photographs.