Annegret Soltau- Photo Object

Photo Object, Photo object research, Photography As Object, Year 2

Annegret Soltau is a well known collage artist who began her career in the 1970’s. Soltau discovered her love for art in her late teens, drawing was her way to escape from everyday life. Her early works include drawings of men and women merged into one being, it was an newspaper article about her work that triggered her to experiment with collage. A lot of the time Soltau used her own face to create the collages as people would get offended with her style of work. Soltau’s aim from her collage work was to create non-human shapes by merging different people and objects together into one ‘portrait’.

Soltau creates her famous images using her own photography, then sowing individual parts of her subjects faces on top of one another. The sowing effect is an aspect of Soltau’s work which adds to the eeriness of her final pieces. By sowing pieces of her photographs onto her other photographs Soltau creates alien beings. I love how Soltau combines different body objects so well, she is able to match certain features of peoples faces perfectly. In my final piece I am going to try different techniques to attach parts of my collages together, some of these will included sowing. By using other techniques to attach my collage together will hopefully give my work an edge.

Justine Khamara – Photo Object

Photo Object, Photo object research, Photography As Object, Year 2

Justine Khamara is a well known Australian artist who works a lot with collage. I chose to look at the work of Khamara because her works links very much to the photograph becoming an object part of this unit. Khamara works by layering images on top of one another to create massive amounts of texture and density, turning the photographs into amazing elaborate shapes. Khamara produces her work by using her own portrait photography, she produces most of her portraiture work in the studio however she does also use environmental portraits in her collage work. Khamara’s most typical way of creating her collages is to shred her images into fine pieces, after shredding her photographs she carful re-arranges them to form elegant sculpture like collages.

The end result of Justine Khamara’s work could be presumed to be digitally edited using photoshop, however this is not the case. Khamara’s work is all put together by hand. In response to looking at Khamara’s work I myself am going to try some different collage techniques. Since my strong point as a photographer is portraiture I am going to combine my skills as a portrait photographer with collage techniques. I am going to try a number of different methods such as; painting over images, ripping them apart, layering and manipulating materials. By manipulating my images in these various ways I am interested in the different results I get. During my experimentation I hope to gain a potential final piece idea. I have finally settled on the idea of collage or photo manipulation for my final piece.

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Still Life – Test Shoot

Photo Object, Photo object research, Photo object test shoots, Still Life, Year 2

Week one of the ‘Photo Object’ technical workshop I focused on still life. I completed a number of different studio set ups working with my objects for still life. The workshop included various different lighting set ups, experimenting with mirrors and different studio lights. The results I got from this task were not what I was expecting, if I could redo the first stage of the workshop I would have brought in different still life objects to photograph. The next stage of the workshop was looking at different surface areas, by elevating different still life objects gave me a different results to the first task in the workshop. Overall the first part of the still life workshop was not a strong point, however I felt needed this part of workshop to build my confidence in still life photography.

The second part of the workshop was my favourite, I worked with a long exposure to create a long lasting light effect. By making the studio pitch black and using a pocket wizard to set off one single flash, I was able to use multicoloured neon lights to create a vibrant background for my still life object. My still life object was a metal sculpture of a chicken from my house, I chose this object because its different and not a standard still life object. By waving different colour lights I created a rainbow effect. In the end I settled for a red light in the background, I chose this particular colour because it complimented my still life object well. The final task of the day was working with large format cameras.

I set up one single shot to shoot on the large format camera. After shooting the image of my choice I went to the film processing lab to put the large format negative in the developing machine. Overall the colour negative came out well, next week during our colour darkroom workshop I am going to develop the picture from the still life work shop.

David LaChapelle – Still Life

Photo Object, Photo object research, Still Life, Year 2

David LaChapell made his name in photography shooting various celebrity’s. LaChapell has worked a lot with commercial photography, his use of extravagant colour and costume design is the complete opposite of my prior research piece on Edward Weston. LaChapell is not know for being a still life photographer but his piece called ‘The Last Supper’ is the reason I chose to research him for my still life unit. The image features models posed in an iconic re-enactment of the last supper, an extremely well known religious event celebrated in many different religious groups.

Although LaChapelle’s image relates more to fashion photography still life, I chose this image because of its links to Vanitas . Vanitas is the art of re-creating still life paintings from to past. Before the invention of photography artist used to create still life’s paintings, symbolising many different things from death, possessions, life and wealth. I personally like the idea of taking a piece of imagery from the past and re-creating it using modern photography techniques. Still life is about referancing and re-working old paintings, describing the everyday and relating object against object. This piece by LaChapelle is a prime example of how effective relating object and object can be. The relation between the vibrant colours on the models clothes and the table cloth compared to the somewhat dull background, really help emphasise the rich colours in the original painting, illumining ‘Jesus’ as the main subject using cleaver lighting techniques and colour choices to make this particular model the centre of attention.

Looking at this photographed has improved my understanding of how colour can be used to emphasise a photographs quality. Every detail of a still life photograph is being judged even down to the smallest object. I’ve learn to consider even the smallest of details, relating the object to the model creating a dynamic between the model and the object. During my next studio session I m going to consider incorporating models into the images and not just working with objects alone. I am going some more time really thinking about what I’m trying to put across in my images whether I’m using objects or people.

Last-Supper