Craig Easton is a Scottish photographer who, through his works, explores identity and the sense of place.

Within the documentary tradition his work often combines expansive landscapes with intimate portraits. He often contextualizes his photographs by offering the protagonists of his portraits the possibility of expressing their own voice through handwriting that he incorporates into the final images.
He received the Cutty Sark Award for World Travel Photographer of the Year 2012/13, and most recently the Landscape award at Travel Photographer Award of the Year 2016/17.

The project ‘Sixteen’ is a collaboration project with 16 photographers from around the UK, with the leader as Craig Easton. The main object of the project is to give a voice to the younger generation, to let them speak about their dreams, fears, ambitions and hopes for the future. With the project the photographers hope to photograph a range of different upbringings, social backgrounds, ethnicity, gender and locations.

The idea of the project came in 2014 when Scotland was holding a Referendum for Independence from the UK, this was the first and only time ever that sixteen were given the right to vote in a government vote in the history of the UK. Craig went and photographed young people who’s birthday was on the day of the referendum ( September 18th, 2014) .

As the project developed he went and photographed sixteen years around the areas of Liverpool and North Wales from a cross-section of society. The images range from the Traveler community to recent refugees from Iran and Syria, he asked the participants to write their own testimony on the fears that they where facing to give them the change to speak openly without a filter. Craigs approach of presenting the handwritten texts alongside the photographs was adapted by the entire group of 15 photographers working on “Sixteen.” But many of them are exploring other methods audio, video of giving these young people a voice in addition to the texts.

SPECIFICATION: Write a specification with 2-3 ideas about what you are planning to do; how, who, when, where and why? Use images to illustrate your ideas

• Carry on experimenting with mirrors how I first started the task.
• Use mirrors to create illusions.
• Use mirrors to create social outlooks on what the image means.
• Incorporating circles into my images with the work of john Baldessari and circle mirrors (maybe pop art).

To take this project in my own direction on the theme of variation and similarity I want to develop the idea of beauty ideals and views on perfection in the modern world. The idea that there is one view of perfection that people should conform to and aspire to reach rather than accepting that everyone is unique and different. I am going to look into reflections considering the artist reference of Erwin Blumenfeld and and reality and editing in the media. I want to start by conducting a simple portrait photo shoot so I can experiment with editing ideas and develop the concept further. I also want to look into celebrity culture and the new age of the influencer and how they can often create unrealistic expectations for looks and lifestyle. I have also thought about researching some theorists such as Kant and Plato and looking at their ideas on beauty, comparing them to modern ideas.

This link shows how this frame can be used to edit a face in photoshop to conform to this idea of perfection: https://fstoppers.com/post-production/perfect-face-anatomy-photoshops-liquify-tool-2657

For the final set of edits I’ve made I used the previous set and then used various images from the shoots I’ve done and overlayed them on top of the original images to add even more detail and definition to my images.

For my cut images is used a black background on a standard 8×10 landscape base, I then chose various images and cut them from the original images using the magic wand tool to create a tear like effect and then I moved them across to the black landscape base and resized them to fit to corners and areas so that other cuts could be moved across.

Idea 1: I have considered taking photos of peoples skin it is something everyone has in common but can also be so different, from imperfections such as spots and berth marks to skin colour I could even look into different ages and how skin changes over time.

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idea 2: Reflections, opposites, using mirrors to frame parts of the body, angle and perspective, world inside the mirror, alternate reality/ fantasy.

idea 3: How people dress to express themselves and show their individuality, introvert/ extrovert.

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John Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California. He was a painter, however Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. He painted in a gestural style but by the end of the decade he had begun to introduce pre-existing images and text often creating riddles that highlighted some of the unspoken assumptions of contemporary painting and in the 1970s he abandoned painting altogether and instead made a large range of media. His interests generally still focused on the photographic image.

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We spent a lesson outside the classroom to do a an outdoor photo shoot task. Started out in pairs we would throw balls up in the air in an attempt to try frame and photograph them with no blur and the ball being in the centre of the view finder. We did this by using a high shutter speed on our cameras in attempt to clearly capture the object. The point of this task was to try and teach us how to photograph a moving object while ensuring the subject was framed in the correct way.

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We then focused on our partners. In this task we again used a high shutter speed on our cameras and tried to photograph our partner who was consistency moving around. This tasked also focused on moving objects and trying to capture them without motion blur.

Further experimenting

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I wanted to experiment further by editing my Images in the style of Baldessari’s works by covering their faces with coloured circles. I did multiple experiments but found these three were the best due to the original image being stronger than other images from the shoot. I found these images where strong as they had multiple subjects in the image and worked the best when creating images the same way as John Baldessari.

Video evidence from the shoot

The first colour photograph made by the three colour method suggested by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855, taken in 1861 by Thomas Sutton.

In 1839, when photographs were seen for the first time, they were regarded with a sense of wonder. However, this amazement was soon tempered by disappointment: photographs captured the forms of nature with exquisite detail, yet failed to record its colours.

Attempting to meet consumer demand, photographers began to add colour to monochrome images by hand. Even at its very best, however, hand colouring was not the solution.

In 1861, James Clerk Maxwell conducted an experiment to prove that all colours can be reproduced through mixing red, green and blue light. This principle was known as additive colour synthesis. With the fundamental theory in place, several pioneers did succeed in making colour photographs, but their processes were complex, impractical and not commercially viable.

It was not until the end of the 19th century that the first panchromatic plates, sensitive to all colours, were produced. Now, at last, the way lay clear for the invention of the first practicable method of colour photography: the autochrome process, invented in France by Auguste and Louis Lumiere.

Autochrome plates are made up of red green and blue microscopic potato starch grains, around 4 million per square inch. When a photograph is taken it passes through the colour filters to the photographic emulsion. The plate is processed to produce a positive transparency. As light travels through the strach grains they begin to combine creating a colour image of the original subject.

For the second part of my 3D edits, I have used a different colour set, green and magenta. This has pulled through some of the more vibrant colours in my images.