For my Personal Investigation I intend to create a photo-book which is centered around specific people in my life and what makes them an individual, I want this to also center around the theme of youth culture. Each section of my book will be about one person and their features/interests and things that make them who they are, I want to include the stereo-typically non attractive of a young person’s being. Things like: scars, tattoos, teeth, eyes. Things that are unique to them. I also just want candid shots of their faces/bodies just doing everyday things.
Context that everything will be changing soon in our lives and the photo-book is about a brief moment in time and how we were at this age, clothes we wore, what we looked like etc, things that used to interest us.I also would like to take a multi media approach where I am going to have my photos developed and later paint and write over them in different ways which relate to my project.
-artists references: Ed Templeton – mixing art with photography on print outs – draws on photos. to talk about: litmus tests, teenage smokers etc, Jim Goldberg.
For my first photo shoot I will photograph three people wearing multiple sets of clothes. However, they will all be wearing the same outfits; which will be a variation of bright, high-end clothing, and more monotone worn-out clothing. I will also encorporate elements of tableaux in this photo shoot by telling the models to have positive facial expressions and body language whilst wearing bright clothing, and the opposite whilst wearing the darker clothing. I will also edit some of the portraits together into a composite image. More specifically I will combine the portraits of each of the models wearing the same outfit, to create a sort of group photo of them all dressed identically.
Although composite portraiture is normally used in large group portraits, I will use it in my much smaller group of models as I only have one of each outfit, so having everyone wear it simultaneously is impossible.
This is an example of the technique I am aiming to use; except my photos will feature multiple people in each shot instead of just one person.
For my first photo shoot I decided to photograph my grandparents archival imagery in order to enhance my understanding of my grandparents lifestyle visually. I intend to look through their photo books capturing weddings, family events, holidays and their old house. While looking through the archival imagery I intend to ask questions about what was happening in the images as well as asking questions about their lifestyle in terms of family structure, traditions, religion, all aspects which have an impact on lifestyle. In order to get a digital copy of the images I intend to photograph the images using my DSLR, manual setting. I intend to keep the ISO and shutter speed low. I did look at scanning in the imagery, however a lot of them are bundled together and are laminated which would make the outcome distorted and not a ‘good quality’. Once I have all the imagery I intend to upload them to light room and select the best imagery which showcase their lifestyle. I will slightly adjust the images to ensure the all detail of the photograph to be showcased, without making it seem highly edited and lowering the quality and authenticity.
After previous research into archival imagery, I learnt the importance of this form of photographs to enhance a photographic project in terms of narrative and structure. Using family archives will allow me to explore my grandparents lifestyle when they were younger, allowing me to see how this underlying theme has changed and developed over time. In addition, the use of archives will spark conversation with my grandparents, allowing me to understand my subject on a deeper level, gaining more research in insight which will hopefully develop the way in which I go about capturing their lifestyle in future photo shoots.
Furthermore, some of the images will still be on film and/or slides which means a lot of the images I may not have access to. However, those images are very ‘old school’ and after emailing my grandparents do not hold much content in terms of showcasing the theme of lifestyle. I will also look at capturing any objects around the house, which my grandparents believe hold meaning and showcase their lifestyle.
The final products of the editing process can be seen below:
In this image, I was looking to focus on editing to paint the picture of the contrast between feminine and masculine features. The broken, split appearance of the image is meant to signify the broken and split boundaries of gender norms, that are presented in the image. The choice to include pink as the boldest colour in the photograph, was decided due to the fact that pink is often seen as a delicate, feminine colour, yet in this context is being used in a bold manner, with a bold pink tone being used to split the black and white fragments of the image. This image was created with the idea of liberation in mind, with the gender and identity of the individual being expressed as bold, proud and strong.
I have selected the above image as a final image due to the shapes and details within it. I feel that the shape of the forearm in the foreground is eye-catching, and draws viewers into the detail of the arm. It also makes it very clear that the arm is of a male, and therefor the viewer may assume immediately that the subject is male. However, the feminine clothing in the background, and the delicate, soft colours of the image give a contrast to this view, and provide contrast between masculinity and femininity in the image. I feel that this image presents a contrast between stereotypical male gender roles, and the defensive, masculine posture of the subject draws attention to the fact that the subject has to hide the feminine side of themselves (the floral dress) in order to present themselves as stereotypically masculine in order to avoid judgement from the outside world.
I feel that the simplicity of this image allows it to covey the meaning in a more fluid and subtle way. I used the split down the centre of the image to represent a split in an individual persona; how they present themselves on the outside may not be the way that they feel on the inside. The cut could also represent a split between what an individual knows is considered socially acceptable, versus what they wish they could be. I feel that the solemn, sturdy pose of the subject (hands held together in-front) helps to express the idea that individuals often have to keep these internal conflicts hidden from the outside world to avoid being judged or stereotyped.
I selected this image as a final image, as I feel it represents and brings to light the more delicate, emotional side of men, and shows that, regardless of the masculine presentation of the individual, their ability to feel, love and their need to be cared for is no less. This image is made to reflect the more feminine aspects of gender stereotyped; the subjects hands are posed in a delicate feminine manner, and the slight warm hue of pink/red is meant to give the photograph an overall soft, feminine feel. However, this is all contrasted by the masculine shapes of the hands, which are placed as the main focal point of the image. I feel that by placing the subject in a feminine pose, while also drawing attention to the detail of the masculine features, helps to reflect the way in which, although an individual may present as stereoypically masculine, clues may show the reality of hidden emotion, and delicacy.
This image, I feel has a slightly vintage appearance to it, with the slight blue hue giving a vintage magazine effect. I decided to use this image as a final image due to the shape of the subject, and the hue that is edited over the top. I feel that the simplicity of the pose helps to draw attention to the clothing of the subject (which is the focal point for this particular image) and the close up allows for the detail of the masculine, contrasting features to be shown. I feel like this image is simple enough to be used as a single image that could sum up the entire study, and its simplicity makes it appealing for a stand alone image.
I feel that this image reflects the work of Helmut Newton, in the way it presents the subject in a posed, model like way, with the focus of the image being the legs of the subject. Using inspiration from Newton, I heightened the contrast of the image in order to draw attention to the details of the shape of the legs, and the details of the clothing of the subject (which contrast one another). I wanted to flip the idea of Newtons work, using a male subject to reflect the reality of the way that Helmut presents his models. Using a male model in a similar way helps to draw attention to the way in which we are desensitised to the sexualization/presentation of women body in media, and yet are not at all used to the same concept occurring with men
For this photo-shoot, I was looking to focus on the contrast between masculine and feminine features, and show how, in the modern era, these contrasts (which were once much more prominent and strict) are beginning to merge into one another. My focus for this photo-shoot was to create a response in the viewer, as the images are bold and striking in their contrast, and therefore I attempted to present a moral example to the viewer, asking them to decide whether the images make them uncomfortable, or whether they embrace the images and the way they differ from typical gender stereotypes. For this photo-shoot, I feel like I was able to show a striking contrast between typical feminine and masculine features, in a way that draws the attention of the viewer, but also reflects the progress that the world is making towards their views on gender and the lack of boundaries that should be placed on individuals when expressing themselves.
After taking inspiration from my planning mind-map, I was able to take a series of images for my first photo-shoot, revolving around the theme of breaking masculine gender roles, and merging both masculinity and femininity in order to show a liberation from gender stereotypes and roles. Here are my results:
Green tick: Will use in editing – Green L: Small lighting problem – Green ?: Possible final – Green F: Small focus problem – Red X: Rejected image – Red F: Focus problem – Red P: Subject position = wrong – Red L: Lighting problem
The final images from my selection can be found below:
After creating this contact sheet, I was able to using editing software Photoshop to edit the images I decided that I would use. I used different editing techniques on the images in order to show different final results, and made an attempt to enhance the colours and contrast of each image using the editing tools on Photoshop:
I decided to experiment with the hue of some of my images in order to give them an overall more blue/green effect. I did this because I believe that by increasing the presence of this colour, the image takes on a more delicate, soft overall feel, therefore reflecting the feminine side of the image that I am trying to convey.
Here, I adjusted the hue, saturation and lightness slightly to give the image a softer effect
As well as editing the hue of my images, I also focused on increasing the contrast and altering the colour balance, in order to give the image an overall slightly softer and lighter effect.
After adjusting these settings, I was able to form an outcome of the image below:
I believe this image works very well, as it conveys a softness in the colours and lightness of the image, but at the same time, the masculine pose of the subject and the focus on the masculine arms helps to draw a comparison between how the subject presents themselves, versus how they may be feeling. The folded arms are protecting/hiding their femininity (the dress).
In my images, I also took steps to eliminate the background of the subject, or replace it with a colour that made sure to push all focus to the subject themselves, and to remove the background that did not match the context of the image. To do this, I used the eyedropper tool to locate a suitable colour on the background, and used the paint brush to carefully paint around the subject, and fill in the background.
In some of my images, I made attempts to show as much contrast as possible between the light and dark areas of the photo, and in doing so enhanced the shapes and patterns of the subject and their clothing, which I feel helps to draw attention to the parts of the image where there is contrast (masculine legs vs the feminine clothing)
Here, I haven to cu around the subject to remove the background, I will then replace the background with a better image that makes more sense to the image.
After cutting out the subject from the background, I changed the image to black and white, and increased the contrast drastically. I then altered the colour balance so it sat more towards a blue hue, and therefore the final image is a black and white image with a slight blue tone, giving it a softer, but still stark bold overall look.
The following images are also a collection of my final images from my first photo-shoot, after the editing process:
This image took very little editing, I simply cropped the image to focus on the hands, and increased the saturation.
This image involved cutting out the image from the original background, and pasting it onto a white background. I then changed the image to black and white, and rose the contrast significantly.
For this image, I used the lasso tool to cut a jagged line down the centre of the image, and highlighted one half of the image in order to select it. I then copied that half of the image onto a separate layer, and was able to adjust the contrast of each 1/2 of the image separately, to create this split, distorted effect on the final black and white image.
This image was cut and pasted onto a white background, and was changed to black and white, with a slight raise in contrast
This image involved using the lasso tool to cut the lines through the image, and I then merged the layers of the lasso images together, in order to create the broken effect. I then individually edited the 2 layers, changing the colour balance of some fragments of the image so they gave a much more pink hue, in contrast to the black and white fragments of the image. I then used the lasso tool to copy and paste sections of the background, in order to clean the background up.
I used the lasso tool to cut and paste certain parts of the image, in order to separate the image into different layers to work on separately.
Here is an example of where i cut part of the original background out. I would then shape this cut-out-part to fir it into any areas where there are blemishes in the background in order to cover them
This image included cropping the image to focus on the hands, and changing the colour balance so the image was more red-toned. I then increased the saturation slightly to bolden the colours.
The above image included using the lasso tool (as used in previous images) to select a portion of the image to copy and paste onto a separate layer. I then edited the 2nd layer to an overall red hue, and increased the contrast of the first layer, also changing it to black and white. Furthermore, I cut the image from the original background and pasted it onto a white background.
So far within my project I have achieved two shoots/experiments involving portraits and personal archival imagery. Over the next couple weeks I will expand on these ideas and create more complex montages inspired by Kensuke Koike and continue mt theme of destruction and erasure of identity. I also intent to do more full length shots so that I have a variety of images but they all correlate to the idea of personal identity.
I liked the concept of multiple people in one photo, where the viewer has the freedom to hone in on any subject. Each person in the photo is telling their own story and could be considered the subject if the image. In response I captured head shot photos of friends stood together but each with their own character.
Response 2:
I enjoyed the humour of this image, yet the genuine nature of it. This candid shot embodies a sense of fun and a less serious side to photography, which I recreated by taking candid shots of the subject in a situation where humour and fun was inevitably going to arise and be able to be captured in an image.
Response 3:
This image in another that shows multiple subjects in the frame but the differentiating factor in this image is the fact that the subjects appear at different heights. As well as conveying the activities of the subjects, having this structure helps to bring the image together in a new way. In response I incorporated myself and a friend in the portrait image, showing us both at differing heights, separate in stature, but visibly both important to the image.
Response 4:
This image is relatively busy. People’s legs can be seen in the background making the only fully visible person in the photograph the focal point of the composition. It is here that a story is being told. The image captures the man’s inebriated state, emphasised through the blurry nature of the image to show the subject’s perspective of the situation. To recreate this I lowered the shutter speed to create a double exposure effect of a moving figure, similarly to Gilden’s piece.
Response 5:
I enjoy the candid nature of this image and fact that the subject is in the middle of an action when the photograph is captured. The photograph is framed by the man cupping the lighter to spark the cigarette in his hands. In response I took candid photographs of the subject as he was drinking from a water bottle, which allowed me to capture the hand holding the bottle clear bottle which almost gives the illusion of reflecting Gilden’s image..
An Iconic street photographer with a unique style, Bruce Gilden was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946. He first went to Penn State University but he found his sociology courses too boring for his temperament and he quit college. Gilden briefly went with the idea of being an actor but in 1967, he decided to buy a camera and to become a photographer.
Although he did attend some evening classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Bruce Gilden is to be considered substantially a self-taught photographer. Right from childhood, he has always been fascinated by the life on the streets and the complicated and fascinating motion it involves, and this was the spark that inspired his first long-term personal projects, photographing in Coney Island and then during the Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
Over the years he has produced long and detailed photographic projects in New York, Haiti, France , Ireland, India, Russia, Japan and now in America. Since the seventies, his work has been exhibited in museum and art galleries all over the world and is part of many collections. The photographic style of Bruce Gilden is defined by the dynamic accent of his pictures, his special graphic qualities, and his original and direct manner of shooting the faces of passers-by with a flash. Gilden’s powerful images in black and white and now in color have brought the Magnum photographer worldwide fame.
Gilden has received many awards and grants for his work, including:
National Endowments for the Arts fellowships (1980, 1984 and 1992),
French “Villa Medicis Hors les Murs” grant (1995),
Grants from the New York State Foundation for the Arts ( 1979, 1992 and 2000),
A Japan Foundation Artist Fellowship (1999)
A Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, in 2013.
Bruce Gilden has published 15 monographs of his work, among them:
Facing New York, 1992; Bleus, 1994;
Haiti, 1996 (European Publishers Award for Photography);
After The Off, 1999;
Go, 2000; Coney Island, 2002;
A Beautiful Catastrophe, 2004;
Foreclosures, 2013;
A complete Examination ofMiddlesex, 2014.
Face, and HeyMister Throw Me Some Beads!, his new book, 2016.
“Do you think of the things you’re photographing as ‘dark’?“
“The world isn’t great, ok? Look what’s going on in the world. from the environment, we’re polluting the world, to terrorism, to everything. Then you have all the governments and the politicians who are all full of shit, they never tell the truth, they’re always promoting what the best deal is for themselves… I mean, come on! So, my pictures are showing that there are problems in this world. I think that the only way you can solve a problem is by confronting it. I’m an optimist.”
In some of your most iconic pictures, one can indeed get the feeling that you can see the soul of the persons you shoot. It seems that what you show is beyond the physical appearance of the subject. Is it the sole goal of your work or just one of its facets for you?
It’s not the sole goal, I don’t think about that really. I put my own soul into it. This is why I can tell you or tell somebody “With all I’ve done, you’re not going to be able to do the same as me. Maybe you’ll do worse, maybe you’ll do better, maybe you’ll do equal.” But the thing is I’ve had a very tough background, emotionally. My parents were pretty strange and I suffered. So I’m putting all of that into my pictures. If you look at the Face (Dewi Lewis – 2015) book, there was a quote by Oscar Wilde that I found two days before printing (interestingly enough, Oscar Wilde and I were born on the same day, October 16): “Every portrait that is painted with feelings is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter”. So those people are me in some way, shape and form. And I put a lot in. I’m not doing it for anyone, it’s not about money, I just have to do it! Just think now, I’m 69 and yet I’m doing new work. How many photographers at 69 are doing new work? I’m not talking if you are using photography to create in a studio, I’m talking about going out there with people. You would be hard-pressed to find many people at 69 doing good work. That means I’m passionate about it and I compete with myself. Even if I had to stop shooting for three months because of a leg injury but now it’s healed. It’s tough to go out there now and sometimes I question myself. Because once I can’t do it, then I’ll stop. I wanted to do the Face project for 20 years, maybe 30 years, a long time ago. I had an idea to do it and then I found the right camera: the Leica S. But I don’t research, I’m not a researcher for equipment. So I found the right camera and that’s how this came about. For the last few years in New York, I was really bored and I needed to do something differently. I would go out but it was really an effort. I mean, it’s always an effort, but it was really an effort. You have to push yourself. The good photographs make it all worthwhile but who knows when you’re going to get a good photograph? I also should say that with the faces, it’s a lot easier to do good pictures than candid photography because when you combine a lot of stuff in the street, anything can go wrong. The stage set is set for you. In my pictures, people are walking. I’m a perfectionist so I couldn’t feel good about a picture unless it’s very good. Even with the faces, I’ve done those for about two and a half years and they got a lot stronger. I have some good ones from the beginning but as I went further, I saw how much more I could get out of it. It’s a learning process.
Selected quotes:
“The world isn’t great, ok? Look what’s going on in the world. from the environment, we’re polluting the world, to terrorism, to everything.”
“I’ve had a very tough background, emotionally. My parents were pretty strange and I suffered. So I’m putting all of that into my pictures.”
“Every portrait that is painted with feelings is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter” – Face (Dewi Lewis – 2015) book
