Christian Boltanski interview with KATALOG:

‘The public wandered slowly past this human sea of individual fates and forgotten lives…’

‘What qualities do you find in the photograph, and what does the medium mean to you?’

‘In my view you can equate the photograph with a dead body, just like an item of used clothing; it has the memory of something, and it is an object where the person behind it has disappeared.’ 

‘…always represents the memory of a reality.’

‘Someone once said that you die twice: when you die the first time and when somebody finds a photo of you and no longer remembers who it shows.’

‘You have talked about your interest in preserving ‘the little memory’. Can you explain what you mean by that?’

‘I mean that everyone is unique, because everyone thinks differently and remembers differently. We consist of all these experiences and memories, it is this ‘little memory’ that makes us different from others.’ 

‘I believe in the importance of every single human being, but even the most important ones disappear quite quickly, especially their little memory. What is most important is most fragile.’ 

‘You’ve said you want to touch people, even to make them weep. It’s rare for an artist today to use these big words and to try to stir the emotions. What do you think is the role of art today?’

‘I want to move people and to ask them questions about evil and good, about disappearance after death and so on. But they are questions to which I have no answers.’[1]

[1] KATALOG- Journal of photography & video- SPRING 1999

Disappearance and Menschlich:

Over the Christmas period I have been looking for new photographers to explore who create surrealist photos like Christopher McKenney and Brian Oldham. I came across Linda Blacker on Instagram and found her images very interesting and different. I like her work and want to incorporate new and unique ideas like hers into my own work to make for more exciting images. Blacker is a fine art photographer, born in Chelmsford, United Kingdom. Her work combines fantasy and reality creating colourful and mystical images. Blacker’s work is very much fantasy and consists of plenty of makeup, props, sets and costumes. Her work is so interesting and different, it stands out and is very strange. Most of the time I just like to look at her work and see what she is doing yet never look into her work in enough depth to start making conceptual ideas of what the meaning behind each image is. They are very visually beautiful and tell a great story of the different characters that she manages to create and portray through her models.

Linda Blacker website: http://lindablackeraluk.co.uk/projects/fine-art/

Linda Blacker Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lindablacker/

“I like to be in control of the entire piece. From the costume, to the set, I style the characters and I am even very precise about the position I want the model to be in.” – Linda Blacker

Interview with Linda Blacker: http://shoottheframe.com/photography-profile/linda-blacker-interview/

Overview | What I Think 

Looking further into the work of Blacker I find it so exciting and full of life. Her work is always so colourful and engaging which I think that I want to use when making my own images. I do think that Blacker’s work is very eccentric and over the top but I love that about her work. I won’t be doing any shoots like hers anytime soon as I don’t think it would be relevant to my personal study but I have taken some inspiration from her creativity and individuality. I want to somehow incorporate colourful smoke bombs into my own surrealist work and want to make unusual images that stand out just as much as the work of Blacker. All of Blacker’s work is done in a studio and with a makeup artist at hand which I obviously do not have but I like the idea of using the studio to make some interesting images.

I find this image particularly interesting as Blacker has literally made the model part of the art work. It almost looks like a painting and the model blends in to that environment so well. In this image the model is unidentifiable and Blacker usually makes images like this on purpose as they aren’t the main event there is so much more going on around the model and Blacker wants the image to stand out as a whole and for her spectators not to just focus on the model. To me the model is supposed to be a cloud or could be a representation of wind, nature etc as she is blowing softly but the hot air balloons look as though they are being greatly affected by her presence. I love the colours in this image as it is so bright and happy. The colourful hot air balloons really stand out and make this image really inviting. Something about this image just makes me curious as it is so strange yet it makes me want to look at it more and find out what is actually going on in the image. It looks as though the entire thing is a painting and the model was painted and told what exact position to stand in and the exact facial expression she should make. I do like the idea of having complete control over my images and being able to position my model how I want them but I always prefer just coming to the scene and choosing what to do there and then, I tend to go with whatever looks best not just the idea and angle that I imagined in my head as it might not always work out that way or look as good as I imagine so being open to changes and different angles is the best for me.

This image also interests me, I get the impression through Blacker’s work that she likes to use paint and make her photographs look like paintings. I like that this image shows a man being the night and the moon while the woman is the sun showing the relationship between the two. The arm the woman has resting on the mans shoulder and his arms around her makes the image seem like the two are in a relationship but almost can’t actually touch each other or hold each other properly as they look strange. Both of them seem to be embracing one another with both of their eyes closed, this could be to make the image more powerful and mysterious focusing more on the whole image and the sun and the moon rather than focusing on two people painted as the sun and the moon. They are supposed to blend into the image to become a part of it and aren’t really there to stand out or to take away from the art work of the image.

Roy Lichtenstein is an American artist, born in New York City in 1923. Lichtenstein’s career hit a high in the 1960s when he became a leading figure of the new Pop Art movement. His work is inspired by comic strips and advertisements, using bright and graphic works parodied American popular culture and the art world. This work was a reaction to some work of artists including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. He wanted to stand out and to challenge the way spectators view art and so became more inspired by advertisements and comic strips making his work unique. Lichtenstein died in New York in September 1997.

Roy Lichtenstein website: lichtensteinfoundation.org/

About Lichtenstein: http://www.biography.com/people/roy-lichtenstein-9381678

Jackson Pollock | Artist of the same period

Jackson Pollock was an artist who was making work at the same time as Lichtenstein. He was very famous and his work is admired by many people today including some celebrities and actors [e.g Matthias Schoenaerts]. He was an American painter and was a leading face behind the abstract expressionism movement. He is known for being one of the most radical abstract art in history of modern art. Lichtenstein wanted to stand out from this and make his own mark on the world and so felt inspired by Pollock’s work but at the same time he wanted to challenge it or even go in a different direction which was to stand out even more than the work of Pollock himself. I really like Pollock’s work although it can seem like just a huge mess, easy and with a load of paint squiggles everywhere. However, I have tried to make painting similar to his and they haven’t been so successful and it is harder than it looks to get exactly what you want your painting to look like. I do think that his work is unique and it is interesting to see all the bursts of colour and different styles that he used within his paintings.

About Jackson Pollock: http://www.jackson-pollock.org/

Jackson Pollock website: http://www.jacksonpollock.org/

 Willem de Kooning | Artist of the same period

About willem de Kooning: http://www.theartstory.org/artist-de-kooning-willem.htm

Willem de Kooning was also an artist at the time and was seen as one of the most prominent and celebrated abstract expressionist painters after Jackson Pollock. His work contains many images of distorted womenly shapes, which reminds me of the work of Picasso. He was a very traditional painter who became famous for his paintings of women, painted in different periods of his life. Lichtenstein was inspired by him through his use of women in art and paintings, which a lot of painters used [and still do] for inspiration. I think that Lichtenstein wanted to pose women in a more human like way showing their emotional states rather than how he physically sees them contrary to the work of Kooning. I don’t really like the work of Kooning as it kind of disfigures the women and makes them come across more as things or objects rather than actual human beings. They look so distorted and messed up that they don’t look human at all, which really does remind me of the work of Picasso and how he would change the facial features and make geometrical shapes out of them to make them unidentifiable.

New York State Pavilion of the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City was a body of work that Roy Lichtenstein famously created. He made images mainly of women being emotional and to me his images see women as weak and small minded. I am unsure whether or not that was his intent but women are shown in more of a negative light through his work. His work is very theatrical and reminds me of the way women are portrayed in Film Noir films and the way those women are seen as being there for the man and only caring about what men think of her, including the femme fatales of those films who are seemingly set out to ruin the man who they have been hurt by.

This piece of artwork stands out most to me as it is very simple and obvious. Lichtenstein portrays this woman as crying over a man that she is dreaming and thinking about all the time. It makes her seem weak and desperate to fall in love with this man or to be with him. I do like this image as I think that it is very powerful as I do think that a lot of women do get upset over stupid men but then again I know that women don’t feel sad for long about that one thing or person, we often move on and become stronger. I feel that Lichtenstein does portray women in more of a negative light in that they are constantly obsessing over men and wanting to be around men and that they need men to function properly which I think is wrong. I would like to respond to his work in some way on how women are actually much stronger than what Lichtenstein portrayed them as and that we can do things for ourselves without thinking about what men are going to think or what they have told us we should be doing. I do think the way that Lichtenstein has created this artwork is very unique and I like his comic strip style as it is different and interesting. A possible meaning behind the idea of using the comic strip could be that it is fantasy and women aren’t actually like that as all comic strips are fiction and are usually made with superheroes and made for the entertainment of the spectator to escape to a different world but ultimately he most likely just used this style so that his work would stand out from everyone else’s.

I also found images of women that have taken the style of Lichtenstein and given themselves a makeover to look like the woman does. I find these images really interesting and almost like a response to his work showing possibly how unrealistic they are and how his drawings don’t really reflect the way women actually are. I like this image of the woman with yellow hair as it again just shows how inhuman this woman is and how she is an ideal that Lichtenstein created that is impossible for women to meet and be like. Much like the drawing the women have used their makeup to make themselves look like a cartoon character and shows how it isn’t a realistic representation of a woman at all and although comic strips are exaggerated they don’t really dehumanize anyone with characters mainly consisting of superheroes with the most prominent element being the exaggerations of their body features.