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Man Ray

Man Ray was a key figure of Dada and Surrealism, one of the few Americans associated with either movement. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, the artist adopted his pseudonym in 1909 and—while he also worked across painting, sculpture, video, and printmaking—became renowned for his striking, sensual black-and-white photographs.

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A number of his portraits—such as Larmes (Tears) (ca. 1932), which features a woman “crying” glass bead tears, and his pictures of Kiki de Montparnasse—are icons of 20th-century art. Man Ray also embraced technical experimentation; he used solarization and made Rayographs as he pushed the boundaries of avant-garde photography. At auction, his work has sold for seven figures, and his paintings have fetched particularly high prices. Man Ray is represented in the collections of such institutions as the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.

Man Ray’s work inspires me due to all the different ways that different shapes are created and highlighted when adding images on top of each other, adding perspective to the previous separate images. For example, the image above has a strong use of symmetry, which creates leading lines from each corner of the image, through the centre and across the hands. The high contrasted monochrome colour helps to show the focal points of the darker points of the image, such as the darker face to the left, as well as the face and hand next to it. Ray’s photomontages play with femininity and form as in his multiple exposure above – featuring Dora Maar, who was a French photographer.

My Experiments

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The photomontage is the process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging, and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image. Sometimes the resulting composite image is photographed so that the final image may appear as a seamless physical print. 

The photomontage is an artistic practice that has endured almost since the birth of photography itself. At its most basic level, the Mphotomontage is a single image combined of two or more original and/or existing images. … A “new” image might also be created by altering an original photograph through tearing and cutting.

It was first used as a technique by the dadaists in 1915 in their protests against the First World War. It was later adopted by the surrealists who exploited the possibilities photomontage offered by using free association to bring together widely disparate images, to reflect the workings of the unconscious mind.

In 1923 the Russian constructivist Aleksander Rodchenko began experimenting with photomontage as a way of creating striking socially engaged imagery concerned with the placement and movement of objects in space. Other key artists of this process are John Heartfield, the German artist who reconstructed images from the media to protest against Germany’s Fascist regime, and Peter Kennard, whose photomontages explored issues such as economic inequality, police brutality, and the nuclear race between the 1970s and the 1990s.

John Stezaker

John Stezaker’s work re-examines the various relationships to the photographic image: as documentation of truth, purveyor of memory, and symbol of modern culture. In his collages, Stezaker appropriates images found in books, magazines, and postcards and uses them as ‘readymades’. Through his elegant juxtapositions, Stezaker adopts the content and contexts of the original images to convey his own witty and poignant meanings.

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In his Marriage series, Stezaker focuses on the concept of portraiture, both as art historical genre and public identity. Using publicity shots of classic film stars, Stezaker splices and overlaps famous faces, creating hybrid ‘icons’ that dissociate the familiar to create sensations of the uncanny. Coupling male and female identity into unified characters, Stezaker points to a disjointed harmony, where the irreconciliation of difference both complements and detracts from the whole. In his correlated images, personalities (and our idealizations of them) become ancillary and empty, rendered abject through their magnified flaws and struggle for visual dominance.

In using stylistic images from Hollywood’s golden era, Stezaker both temporally and conceptually engages with his interest in Surrealism. Placed in a contemporary context, his portraits retain their aura of glamour, whilst simultaneously operating as exotic ‘artifacts’ of an obsolete culture. Similar to the photos of ‘primitivism’ published in George Bataille’s Documents, Stezaker’s portraits celebrate the grotesque, rendering the romance with modernism equally compelling and perverse.

This is part of John Stezaker’s “marriage” series. which took famous pictures of celebrities at the time, and added juxtaposing images on top. This image is black white, with quite low contrast. The placing of the second image in the middle of the first creates a natural focal point. This also adds balance to composition, utilizing the rule of thirds. There is a slightly darker area to the right, on the male subject’s clothing. This creates soft contrast between the lighter tones of the woman’s clothing and these darker tones.

My Experiments

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Sequences–

In photography, Sequences are a way of laying out images, most often in a line or grid. Doing this often causes the person looking to think about the similarities and differences between the images (similar to a juxtaposition), as well as causing them to think of a potential story or narrative as the sequence progresses. This can be used by photographers to tell stories without the need of words.

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I used a variety of my images, from several shoots, to create a set of sequences with different compositions. I think it would have been better if I did a separate shoot so all of the images so that they are all similar to create at least one unified sequence.

Mood Board

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Ole Christiansen

Christiansen has worked to create several record covers, magazines and exhibitions during his photography career. He gravitates towards photography that links to music, which involves photography for album/record labels and sometimes the artist themselves.

Image Analysis

This image uses a light which has been positioned to show only the model’s face, with a Rembrandt angle. The lighting is harsh, as it creates a bold shadow behind the nose which leads to the right side of the face, the shadowed parts are pitch black, which heavily contrasts with the lit up parts on the left side of the model’s face, giving it a chiaroscuro look. I think a black and white filter is appropriate for this image as it allows that contrast to be seen more easily. I like the way the model’s facial expression and the lighting makes the image look that much more mysterious and isolates the emotion from the facial expression, emphasizing it. I think that a straight-on viewpoint was also effective as it allows the face to be centre in the image, while making the staring expression of the model that much more noticeable.

My own Images

My Best Images

I chose this image because I like how the model’s face is lit up, it allows his facial features to be seen more easily, despite being a side-on shot. I also think that the lighting helps give his face slightly more depth. There is not a lot of contrast in this image, likely due to how the majority of his face/head and the background are a similar tone of grey, however the white on his clothing and darker black of his hair does create an interesting contrast.

I mainly like this image because of its colder tone which gives the image a look that is close to black and white, but not exactly. I like the way the side/one-point lighting creates a dense shadow on the left side of the models face, completely obscuring it. The shadow contrasts greatly with the highlights on the models face and makes the left of the image almost completely black, creating a harsh divide between the sides, which makes the image slightly more mysterious.

I like this image because of how simplistic it is, I think it, paired with the front facing stare, allows the model to take all of the attention of the viewer. I think that black and white works well in this image as it allows the shadow to become harsher and more distinguished from the lighter parts of the image. This image uses Rembrandt lighting which gives the model slightly more light, which makes more of his face visible. I think that the white background helps isolate/frame the model nicely.

I chose this image as a final image because I like the way that the hood casts a shadow over the model’s eyes and chin (making the face stand out behind a black ‘frame’), but allows for a butterfly light to appear as well. I think the black and white filter was appropriate for this image as it makes the shadows darker, creating a greater contrast between the highlights and the white background of the image.

I chose this image because I like how the model’s face’s colour contrasts with the rest of the image, his clothes specifically being made up of dark blues and purples. I also think that the simple, casual pose paired with his relaxed facial expression creates a nice, calmed atmosphere about the image. I think that the softer lighting, which illuminated the grey backdrop, also helps with this calmed atmosphere, with the grey backdrop providing some contrast, but not too much.

Multi exposure–

Multi exposure is a photography and filmmaking technique where two or more images are superimposed onto each other. They can be used to create interesting and surreal images.

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I made these using my portraits that I took earlier. It took me a while to find the right balance with the layer opacities, but I found some that I liked. If I were to do this again I’d use a wider variety of images and a range of colours and layer types to see if it can make them seem more interesting.

Photomontage-

Photomontage is the editing and layering of two or more images on top of each other to create a new image. These images could have significant to no relation to each other and the combination of them creates a new image with a completely new meaning.

Creating my own-

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Editing

After my photoshoot, I edited my best images.

Sequencing and Grid work

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The Deadpan Aesthetic

The deadpan photograph simply says “this is how things are”. Deadpan portraits show people in their natural state, typically not showing any sort of emotion. These subjects are not posed, are not dressed up for the occasion, and seem completely honest. The color of deadpan photographs is commonly de-saturated. While not completely devoid of color, the colors tend to be muted.

Bernd and Hilla Becher

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Bernhard “Bernd” Becher, and Hilla Becher, were German conceptual artists and photographers working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures, often organised in grids.

Together, the Bechers went out with a large 8 x 10-inch view camera and photographed these buildings from a number of different angles, but always with a straightforward “objective” point of view. They shot only on overcast days, so as to avoid shadows, and early in the morning during the seasons of spring and autumn. Bernd and Hilla Becher first began their still-ongoing project of systematically photographing industrial structures – water towers, blast furnaces, gas tanks, mine heads, grain elevators and the like – in the late 1950s.

Home

My Experiments

After editing my images with subtle adjustments, keeping them all in black and white to mimic the work of the Bechers, I created grids in photoshop. I did this by exporting my images from Lightroom to photoshop, then creating a blank document (A3). I then added each image, lined them up to create equal borders, and cropped the document to my desired size.

Throughout this photoshoot, we kept changing the lighting by turning them on/off, adding more lights, moving them closer etc in order to experiment with the different shadows and create different looks for each image.

Best Shots:

I think these are my best shots as they’re all in focus, well framed and have a variety of lighting types, all of which combine together in order to create an interesting set of images. Along with that, I like all the poses in these photos as they all differ from each other drastically, giving each individual image a different mood compared to the rest.

Diamond Cameo–

A Diamond Cameo is when an arrangement of 4 portraits are used to make a diamond shape, they were all pictures of the same person who were often Victorian men at the height of their popularity.

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I used Black and White images to try to make them all seem more uniform, as having them in colour could seem distracting from the subject.