For my exam project i am going to continue with the trend of vehicles in my photos. However i am going to include portraits into the images. I am going to photograph my driving friends in the style of Robert Avedon as well as my motorbike friends to take photos photos in the style of Danny Lyons. I admired Danny Lyons’s photos during his time with hells angles. These are the types on photos i want to recreate but in a modernised form using modern bikes as well as different styles of bike such as sport. I will reference Avedon by taking photos of my driving friends in a portable studio. Additionally i intend to mix the styles of the two photographers by maybe photographing people in front of their cars but only part of the car so i can keep the upper body style of Avedon.

For my exam project, I will focus on looking at the theme of SIMPLE OR COMPLEX by taking images that relate to the sublime – an emotion defined by terror, ecstasy and sheer beauty. In order to capture the sublime within my images, I will turn my camera on the woodlands around my home, with my images aiming to display an innate feeling of danger, while simultaneously showing the beauty of the natural landscape.

I will take a range of images including close up shots, as well as more grandiose landscape images that relate closer to the feeling of the sublime (this linking with the COMPLEX side of the initial project theme). For these images, I will take inspiration from Chrystel Lebas’ work, as her work (specifically her woodland images) give off a sense of danger and beauty in the way I would also like to capture in my images. I think this sense of danger would add to the idea of the sublime and, with nature being forefront in the sublime anyway, settings such as a woodland would be a good way to capture the idea of the sublime.

As for the close up images, I would like to explore the idea of the Golden Ratio that can be seen all throughout nature, linking human concepts of mathematics (Fibonacci) with nature. I would also like to explore still-life/object photography by collecting objects from the natural woodland and photographing them in a home-made studio in the style of Talbot’s fern images or a cyanotype image created by Anna Atkins (linking with the SIMPLE side). I like the look of these images as they appear fairly simple and have a level of detail (as well as a somewhat abstract look) that gives them complexity. I will also take images during the blue hour, in order to further my knowledge and skills of taking night photographs.

An artist with a similar approach but different outcome would be Karl Blossfeldt, whose work captures natural form and shape in objects such as flowers and other plants in a formal, yet alluring manner.

After I have taken my images I will explore the use of AI software such as Dall-E or Midjourney to recreate my own images. This will diversify my images (not only within this project, but also with my images from previous projects) and juxtapose the idea of taking images of an ancient setting such as the woodland with the use of modern software to recreate them. I will research the AI software so I can make better use of them later in the project. The use of AI would also link to the complexity of the software itself, linking back to the main theme of the project.

To start collecting ideas for my exam project, I put together a mindmap to put together simple themes, ideas and starting points regarding what I consider to be ‘simple’ or ‘complex’. The mindmap contains some ideas of what I could use as subject matter, how I can edit or manipulate my images, as well as different themes I could consider while starting this project.

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Next I created a moodboard of images that relate to the theme of ‘simple or complex’, which I can use to inspire ideas for this project. For this project, I would like to explore a different style of photography, such as object photography, or explore different areas with my camera.

To make my images in this project different to the images from past projects aesthetically I would like to change how I use colour in my images. Colour being the main focus of my previous images, changing the focus of the images in this project would then make them different to my previous work.

The theory behind ‘Binary opposites’ –

The theory of ‘Binary opposition’ within photography and in a larger context reveals how everything in life revolves around a system which we can use to classify everything around us into a variety of 2 different groups. These groups can be seen as two opposites which are strictly against one another, e.g. ‘simple or complex’, ‘hot or cold’, ‘win or lose’, ‘left or right’, ‘love or hate’, etc. The term ‘Binary opposition’ can also be applied within literature and language where there are ‘Synonyms’, a word which means the same as another, against the opposing term of ‘Antonyms’, which is a word that is of opposite meaning. Furthermore, this shows how we are always surrounded by the theme of ‘Binary opposition’ as it is applied within everyday life in objects, cultures, systems, politics, ethics, language, etc.

Therefore, this ‘theory of binaries’ comes from a larger bracket of ‘Structuralism’ which is apart of psycholinguistics of how we create meanings of language. This was furthered through the early work of a famous Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and then this was further studied by the French anthropologist Levi Strauss and another linguist academic, Roland Barthes, during the 1900s. This theory explored into the insight of how we understand words and not their direct meaning, and how they have opposing terms as well. They concluded that words are a part of symbolism regarding societies ideas, and that their relationships were a fixed idea amongst one another and that one term is always valued more than the other. An example of this can be seen in the understanding of the word ‘coward’, someone who is weak and scared, and its opposing word ‘hero’, used to describe someone who is impressive in their nature and what they may do, which can link towards attitudes which we can refer to as ‘dominant ideologies’, which means the shared ideas/beliefs which justify the interests of different groups. A further exploration into this was in the study of literature as there are many layers from the meanings of words and how they are made and reinforced through the theory of ‘binary opposition’. For example, this can be seen in Simon Armitage’s poetry as he creates this reinforced idea of binary opposition through the ‘sincerity’ opposed to ‘insincerity’ of societies dislikes towards cultures.

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How I will use binary opposition within my own work –

Simple –

The theme of the binary opposite of ‘Simple’ in photography, can be interpreted in a variety of different ways. This can be linked to the ideas of still life and how you can easily compose objects together with the use of how they may appear or the colours, and how well they work together which can represent how simple life can be portrayed through the use of different objects. There are many artists and photographers who have explored the theme of still life photography extensively in a variety of different ways, such as through abstraction or contrasts, an initial selection of these artists and photographers are:

• Thomas Demand
• Jan Bruegel
• Willem Kalf
• Paulette Tavormina
• Richard C. Miller
• Henry Fox Talbot
• Josef Sudek
• Andy Warhol

Complex –

The theme of the binary opposite of ‘Complex’ in photography, can also be interpreted in a variety of different ways. This can be seen through the contrasting ideas of the complexity of still life and how they can hold a deeper message within them besides using different objects/colours to create a contrast against one another. In my own work I have chosen to explore how different kitchenware/utensils create unique reflections and shadows and how this can be linked towards the theme of feminism and the links that are still around, although they have mainly died out, of women holding traditional household roles such as being in the kitchen or cleaning. I will represent this theme within my own work through using harsher and bolder shadows through uniformed kitchenware/utensils to represent the past and how women are still linked towards this whereas to show the change of this mindset in my own work, I will use more colourful and bright kitchenware/utensils to represent how women have mostly been able to move past the stereotype. Artists/photographers who I have found that can link towards this theme of shadows/reflections in still life are:

• Irving Penn
• Paul Outerbridge
• Andre Kertesz
• Sophie Calle
• Imogen Cunningham
• Simon Brutnell

Mindmap