1. Francesca Miller-Hard

Examples of her work:

Francesca Miller-Hard is a popular, but not famous, photographer who focuses her work around people and fashion. She was born in New Zealand, but bases her work in Melbourne, Australia. Francesca mainly bases her work around girlhood and the reality around beauty standards of women, which is the main reason I wanted to use her work as inspiration for mine. She created a project called ‘A Love Letter To Girls’, which is a collection of images that explore vivid images around girls and their lives. Francesca said that her work is an exploration of her personal experiences and the connection of feminine energy, which is what I would like my photography to focus on.

In Francesca’s collection of work, she has a name for every photograph:

One thing that really stood out to me was when Francesca said “I was inspired by my own teenage experiences to create a visual appreciation for the connections I made with girls that moulded me into the woman I am today“. I would like to photograph me and my friends, and our daily experiences together as girls. Although most of my photographs will be staged, I also want to capture candid interactions and genuine moments between friends.

On top of that, I also want to reflect my photographs onto my own childhood, so there is a personal aspect within my work. This will help to create a nostalgic vibe to my photography.

Angles/lighting:

In most of her images, we find that there is dim lighting, with a yellowish tone to convey a sensual feeling around the images. Most of the angles are seen as an overhead shot or birds eye view, which creates this idea that the images are more personal, almost as if they aren’t staged.

2. Justine Kurland

Examples of her work:

Justine Kurland is an American fine-art photographer who lives in New York City and is best known for photographing subjects in American wilderness landscapes. She has travelled across the United States to create these staged photos, but spent many months traveling through New Zealand as well. Kurland has become famous for her tableaux photography around landscapes dealing with young children, men, and women, often mixing the purity of youth with its unbridled wildness. Her works of feral and unsupervised children running around in a suburban wasteland reveals a clear connection to the theme of her photography.

Kurland’s narrative work is heavily influenced by nineteenth-century English picturesque landscapes and the utopian ideal as well as genre paintings, the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron and Mathew Brady, and illustrations from fairy tales.

I am going to focus on Kurland’s staged tableaux photography that explores the social landscape of girlhood. Kurland is clearly very in touch with nature and the primal impulses of humanity, which I would also like to reinforce through my photoshoot.

Image analysis:

This image particularly stood out to me as I feel like it was the most creative and interesting one to look into. In this image, there is a group of teenage girls portrayed as rebellious and free as they are alone in the woods. They could be seen as slightly masculine due to the fact that the girls are seen as fearless and they make their own food by hunting animals to eat. This image conveys an idealised and utopian sense of the American wilderness through the subjects appearing to be the very image of self-reliance and individualism. All of Kurland’s photographs are staged in natural settings, such as the wilderness, yet Kurland attempts to make her photographs look realistic. We also see that there is rarely any eye-conact between the subjects and the camera, which reinforces this idea that Kurland attempts to produce photographs that look natural and spontaneous.