Wednesday, 30 April 2008

Stephen Gill

I came across Stephen Gill's work in Grafix magazine. His 'Hackney Flowers' series interested me as i had already taken some of my own photographs of flowers in the studio and around leeds.

This is a description of the series from the photographers website...
(http://www.stephengill.co.uk/nobody/books.html)

Stephen Gill has again used his surroundings as the inspiration for this beautiful and evocative series. Hackney Flowers has evolved from his series and book Hackney Wick. This times Gill has collected flowers, seeds, berries and objects from Hackney, East London, that were then pressed in his studio and re-photographed alongside his own photographs and found ephemera, thus building up multi-layered images extracted from the area. Some of the base photographs were also buried in Hackney Wick, allowing the subsequent decay to imprint upon the images, stressing this collaboration with place. A parallel series also runs within this finely produced volume, showing members of the public in Hackney with floral details on their person. This is a warm, poetic and visually exciting book containing images that leave an overwhelming sense of colour, emotion and rhythm extracted from a single borough of London.






The images were that particularly inspiring to me are the ones below...
I like the way Gill uses flowers to make an image pleasing to the eye which otherwise wouldn't be.

After researching Stephen Gill i had the idea to do a series of photographs based on council estates. There is a council estate opposite where i live in Leeds which has some quite unsightly high rise flats. I would like to photograph the estate and use my product photographs to make the buildings look more pleasing.


Buried...
This is another series of Gill's work entitled 'Buried'. Although they are not digitally manipulated they were created in a very interesting way...

The photographs were taken in Hackney Wick and later buried there.
The amount of time the images were left underground varied depending on the amount of rainfall. The depths that the pictures were buried at also varied, as did their positioning. Sometimes they were facing each other, sometimes back to back or sometimes buried singly.

Not knowing what an image would look like once it was dug up introduced an element of chance and surprise which I found appealing. This feeling of letting go and in a way collaborating with place - allowing it also to work on putting the finishing touches to a picture - felt fair. Maybe the spirit of the place can also make its mark.
(http://www.stephengill.co.uk/buried/index.htm)





I really like how the colours run into each other. They remind me of the Nick Knight photos of Naomi Campbell. They become slightly abstract and there is a real texture about them. Although i will be creating my images digitally i would really like to emphasize texture within my work.



This is the article from Grafix magazine below. I find the methods he uses to produce his work very interesting... 'the method itself becomes a response to the subject.'

A History of Leeds

As my images will be a reprsentation of the city of Leeds it seemed appropriate to research some the city's history and see how it has been documented in the past.

http://www.leodis.net - This website is a photographic archive of Leeds. A project delivered by Leeds Library & Information Service. It has 51, 540 old and new photographs of Leeds. I have chosen some of the most photographed areas of Leeds and the most iconic buildings of Leeds to display on the blog - these have given me ideas about what and where to photograph for my own work.


This is Cuthbert Broderick, the architect of both the Town Hall and the Corn Exchange.



To compare these photographs to Leeds as it is now I also looked at the new corn exchange website (www.cornex.net) and how they had photographed the building for advertising purposes. Flickr was a good research tool to see how other photographers had approached the subject of Leeds, perhaps more artistically.

Monday, 28 April 2008

Change of Idea

After discussions with Neil I have decided to steer away from the graphic fashion images that i have been looking at and instead concentrate on buildings, using the same techniques of threshold and selecting colour range as i did in task 2. This decision has given me a much clearer idea of what i want to achieve. I will be using some iconic Leeds buildings such as the Corn Exchange and the Town Hall to create graphic images. It seems appropriate to use the Corn Exchange as a focus for my images because of the recent news coverage and restoration it is currently undergoing. Despite mass protesting the plans to convert the corn exchange into a food emporium will be going ahead. I will be attempting to address this issue with my images.

Here is a link to an interesting BBC article on the Corn Exchange...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/leeds/content/articles/2007/11/22/skyline_new_corn_exchange_feature.shtml

Tiphanie Brooke

Tiphanie Brooke aka Antigirl is an artist i came across in Computer Arts magazine. She creates mixed media colleges. Her style is similar to the kind of images i want to create by using my own photographs, scanned in images and materials.

The images below are from the section 'women' on her website www.antigirl.com. They seem to be influenced by fashion and remind me of my earlier research on Nick Knight's Dolls. A combination of these ideas is ideally what i would like to achieve.






Metz and Racine

For task 2 the backgrounds i used were created by scanning in colourful magazine adverts. For my final images i would like to use backgrounds that i have created. Using the images below as inspiration I have decided to take my own product photographs in the studio using toys, jewelry, sweets etc.



Wednesday, 23 April 2008

The Idea


For my final images i would like to continue creating quite graphic images like the one above (from task 2). These images were the most successful and would give me the freedom to experiment. I will be using a small number of techniques and tools in Photoshop, keeping the image simple. This will allow me to clearly demonstrate the skills i have learnt.