Wolfgang Tillmans is an influential contemporary German photographer. He began his career photographing nightclubs roughly three decades ago. Known since the early 1990s for his photographs of young people in their social environment – clubs, gay pride parades, warehouse parties.

Tillmans was initially known for his seemingly casual, sometimes snapshot-like portraits of friends and other youth in his immediate surroundings and scene. Tillmans was considered the “documentarian of his generation, especially that of the London club and gay scenes. Half of his work is staged, with the artist choosing the clothes and the location, as well as setting his models up in their positions.

Mood board

This mood board of Wolfgang Tillmans club images are the types of images that I would like to take in my own photoshoots.

Image Analysis

I have chosen this image to analyse this image of a woman with a mans hands in her hair. This image stood out to me because it was a lot closer up to someone and more focussed on one person instead of a group of people like lots of his other images. The main focus of the image is the woman and the hands in her hair, the arm is the brightest thing in the image making it catch your eye then the background is very dark. The image was taken in a club, which could be a tense upbeat place, but the woman looks like she is calm, the hands in her hair could be adding to the relaxing feeling. This is the most interesting factor of the image as it makes you wonder why she looks calm, it could be that the man is someone she trusts or loves or she could be drunk/on drugs.

For this photoshoot, I went into the studio and took some close up headshots of a girl. I made sure to capture her from a variety of different angels by getting her to face different directions. I also placed a light source directly in front of her face to make sure the images would be well lit and the camera would pick up every detail on her face. Once I had finished taking my pictures, I imported them into Lightroom and began the narrowing it down process. This involved me giving each image either a white flag or black flag then giving a rating out of 5 to all the images I had previously given a white flag to. I then adjusted the exposure, contrast, blacks, whites and shadows of the images. Then I exported them into a folder which I could then open up in photoshop.

To begin my editing process, I first chose the image I wanted to have in the background as my vague guide to where I should place the cut outs which would make a different, distorted face. I then cut out only the model from the image using the object selection tool and placed her on a blank piece of white paper as Brno Del Zou’s images are typically on white backgrounds but my background before was grey.

I then selected 7 other images that I wanted to use to get different parts of her face from different directions. I opened one of these images and used the rectangular marquee tool to create a box over the facial feature I wanted to use eg lips. I then dragged this cut out onto the full face image and adjusted it using ctrl t. Once I was happy with its placement I opened up a different image and repeated the process once again but with a different facial feature. When taking the images in the studio, I zoomed the camera into the model more in certain photographs so I could really capture a specific part of her face. This allowed for the random enlarged features seen in Brno’s work to be replicated in mine. Once I had completely reconstructed her face, I then decided to add a drop shadow to all of the cut outs to give my images some more depth and emphasise the idea that it was a face many out of lots of different images.

Finally, I experimented with the use of black and white. I created some images where the whole image was black and white as seen in Brno Del Zou’s work, but also created some where only certain boxes were black and white whilst the others remained in colour.

Final outcomes:

Overall, I like how this idea came out as I managed to closely resemble the work of Brno Del Zou whilst also adding my own twist on his idea. However, I may attempt to do this idea again but with a different model as I have used the same one quite a lot and I want to expand on the idea of identity in young people not just one person.

Second Attempt:

For this second photoshoot, I used photographs of another model I had previously taken in order to get different people in my project and therefore different identities as before it only consisted of one person. I completed the same process as described above to create my final image.

Final outcomes:

I like how these pieces came out as I also used images where she was smiling and then looking sad in order to portray the many emotions one may feel when trying to discover who they are and discuss the complexity of being human simultaneously. However, I would like to further this idea even more by using multiple people to make one face as I think this would portray how there’s such a vast amount of people in the world, each with their own unique identities.