Tag: experimentation

For this shoot I took a lot of inspiration from Christopher Mckenney, a surrealist photographer. I really enjoy his work and find it visually interesting. I think that this really gives off a dream-like reality as a lot of his work shows clothing without the person’s bare skin ever being shown. I adopted this idea for my own work and in some photos did a similar thing and others I got some inspiration from his work and put my own little twist on it. I enjoyed editing these too. I thought this style was great as it isn’t something you see every day, its weird and unique, it makes for a really interesting photograph and I like how experimental it is.
I find much of Mckenney’s work very intense and with a deeper meaning but my photographs do not hold the same meaning. My photographs aren’t supposed to make sense, they allow people to broad their minds and to think more in-depth than they usually would to really try to understand what I am trying to portray to them but the real meaning of my surrealism photographs is simply what the spectator thinks of them. There is no right or wrong specific meaning behind them, I want to give room for people to bring their own meaning to my surrealist photographs. Although, if I had to portray meaning in these photographs I would say how in our society we often judge people by what they look like and how they dress. We as humans don’t tend to see someone for their individual personality but we first judge them on their physique and we don’t allow them to first talk to us as we have already got our first impression and opinion of them. I want to say that people are quick to judge and if we only ever saw someone for their physique then we would live in a very different world, an invisible one whereby everyone hides behind their clothing and objects instead of embracing their bodies and accepting others for what they look like and who they are.

http://www.christophermckenney.com

An image that particularly caught my eye was the one below.

All rights of this photograph are reserved by Christopher Mckenney

I find this image very hard hitting. The American flag wrapped around the subjects head and the suit the subject is wearing makes me think of the American Dream and that if you can make it there you can make it anywhere. The gun, to me, represents the pressure of being successful has brought on the subject and that the dream isn’t all its made out to be. The fact that the subject is submerged in water makes me think that he possibly doesn’t want to be found when he does shoot himself and the dream. I think this is a great surrealism piece as it isn’t something you would ever expect to see in real life, especially the American flag wrapped tightly around the subjects face. The background looks very dull and gives more of a chilling atmosphere to add the the main prop of the gun in the image. I really enjoy this and think that it is a great visual representation of how people may actually feel and really embodies surrealism. I really enjoy the reflection of the subject in the water which adds more to the image. Overall I think that this is a really great image and can say a lot about the subject and is a great surrealist piece. I really want to explore this movement further and come up with some more ideas with a deeper meaning behind them.

Surrealism Plan/Ideas:
Images all in woods/forest
– Subjects legs and shoes only on a log with everything else rubbed out
– Image of subject holding balloon up on a long coil of string. Wearing black hat. Face rubbed out/or balloon covers it [experiment with swapping face of balloon with face of model]
– up close shot of subject with black hat on holding balloon in front of face, everything rubbed out accept balloon, hair and hat
– sheet covers certain parts of body all bare skin/clothing out of sheet is rubbed out
– image of subjects clothing but all bare skin is rubbed out

In this project I was able to imbed chance, change and challenge. It was a bit of a chance to guess how he managed to create him work. For this I took a photo of the background image and then got my subject to stand in front and I positioned them how I wanted them and then in Photoshop layered the images on top of one another and used the eraser tool to create a new image where the bare flesh of the subject isn’t there at all. It was also quite challenging as it isn’t something that I would usually do and a lot of people may not understand it but I did actually really enjoy it and thought that it was successful. The change is also the style of the photograph and my experimentation with surrealist photography which also ties into performance photography. My subject has to stand in various odd positions in order to create a good photograph and to make them as visually interesting as those of Christopher Mckenney.

Here are the images I made as a response to Surrealism photography, specifically Christopher Mckenney.

Invisibility Cloak

For this shoot I went with the theme of not being able to see any bare skin. I like the idea of this as I wanted to portray people as invisible and can only be seen for their clothing. I wondered what it would be like to live in a world where everyone is invisible and whereby instead of hiding behind clothes to cover ourselves we use them as a way to be identified, to express ourselves and to make our presence known.

First of all we were split into our small groups of 10 and went off with different teachers. The first place my group and I went to was the beach area and the long walkway. Here we worked in our pairs and came up with a few of our own ideas. Tania and I came across a large window which had these massive bars on them. With the idea of weak anarchy in mind we decided that it would be a good idea to film me climbing it. The meaning behind this was to challenge the norm and what is expected of us as a society, to see the reaction of the public around. Some people decided to film us and take photos of us while we were performing as well as other students recording at the same time to get different perspectives of the performance.

Another idea we had was actually taken as inspiration from one of Tom Pope’s Weak Anarchy photographs. Here I hid in a bush to see how any spectators would perceive it. We didn’t manage to get the spectators on camera but some people came by and took photographs and left. This one wasn’t the most successful footage but was some good experimentation anyway.

Mr Toft came up with the idea to go sit on a bench with a man and mimic his pose. After Sophie and I volunteered we went and sat right next to him. I greeted him in French and sat down and copied his pose. We sat there for about a minute but the man didn’t catch on to what we were doing and I could tell he felt uncomfortable. I think that this was a fun thing to do although I did feel bad that the man was so uncomfortable. I thanked the man for his time and walked away.

We had the idea to draw on the walls down at the beach area with chalk. We simply wrote ‘St Malo 2015’, this was just to start off the final montage video of all of our performances. This wasn’t very interesting to do and no one really saw but still it was a way to start us off on the beach and so that anyone later on in the day would be able to see that we were there.

On the beach there were a pair of two men playing with a bat and ball so Tania and I decided that it would be an interesting idea to go and stand in the middle of their game to see how they would react. This was successful as they reacted well by laughing it off and they just carried on playing around us. This was one of the most interactive performances that we ended up doing and actually worked well.I did attempt to just walk alongside a woman on the beach as she strolled along but this wasn’t successful because I felt awkward just following her and I could see that she felt uncomfortable so I walked away. I did however go up to a couple who were sat on the wall eating, sat next to them and started drawing. This worked ok as the could just looked at me once and didn’t seem to be bothered by me. This also showed that the two didn’t feel like their space was being invaded even though I was quite close to them.

On the next hour we lacked ideas and inspiration. We were walking along a large walkway and there was just nothing around that I felt inspired by or interested in. We did a few group performances. The first of which was pretending to be the statue and mimicking it. This for me wasn’t very interesting and didn’t really have anything to do with our idea of weak anarchy. It had no real reason and spectators just did not care at all.

The second thing that we did as a large collective was for one person to go and sit on the bench, put down an object and walk away. The next person would pick up that object and replace it with something of their own. This for me was boring and didn’t really make sense. A few people were looking at us but I think this was only because there was a large crowd of us photography students all taking photographs of the same thing, spectators wanted to see what all the fuss was about and if they too should be taking photographs of what is going on. I feel like this sort of worked as it did get some audience attention but it wasn’t overly successful with actually being interesting or much of a movement within performance photography.

For the final hour we worked alongside Tom Pope. This was a great hour for doing work as a large group. The first thing that we did was walk backwards in a busy street. We each filmed from our own perspective of the walk which is interesting to watch back. This was fun to do as we all just walked through the street and people had to move out of our way in order to avoid bumping into us which is different to how we spent most of the day when we were the ones who were avoiding French workers and students.Another collective idea that we had was to carry one person round the streets of St Malo. Here we nominated Holly with other students carrying her as she navigates everyone around. This got a lot of looks and people from all around were watching us as we did this.

We decided that it would be a great idea to navigate our way around St Malo with a map from Jersey St Helier. Here we just walked around in a large circle and came across as small shop with a load of wooden swords which we battled with and Tom Pope photographed on his film camera and as other students filmed and took photos of. This was fun and we were able to mess around for a good minute before the owner of the shop told us to stop. So on we went with our map and navigated around the streets of St Malo right up until we got ice cream and have to leave for the Harbour to get the boat back home to Jersey.

Currently I am working on making a montage video of the entire day in St Malo as well as performance videos. This should be completed in the week. Over the day I made short little clips so that I could use them for documentation of the whole trip as well as recording all of the performances we decided to create. For my first video I am just going to show little clips of everything that we did in the day as a teaser for the actual performance videos. This includes snippets of my performances as well as other groups performances. We thought it would be a good idea to help each other out and record each others performances so that we have different perspectives of things and different approaches to looking at them. We also decided to film the spectators reactions as performance photography is all about the audience and who is there at the time to see you and your performance.

I like looking at the images, created from the videos, in black and white instead of colour because it allows the spectator to focus on what is going on in the image rather than being distracted by all of the different colours in the background that are not important.

Tourist Stuff
These six photos were just extra photos that I decided to take on my phone so that I had a record of the different places that we went to in St Malo.