Home Sweet Home…week 1
Unit 2: The Photographic Project - Research
Learning Outcome 1 (LO1): Understand photographic research
Carry out research for a photographic project (AC 1.2)
Research other artists’ work. Analyse the way ideas, materials and techniques can be used to inform your own practise.
Gregory Crewdson
(born 1962)
Born in Brooklyn, Crewdson photographs scenes of American homes and neighbourhoods. He typically plans each image with attention to detail, orchestrating light, colour and production design to portrait dreamlike scenes infused with mystery and suspense. Crewdson is compelled by how the still image freezes time and sets limitations, “like a story that is forever frozen in between moments, before and after, and always left as a kind of unresolved questions”. He often uses solitary figures. His carefully staged photographs evoke tensions between natural forces and the urban everyday; the photographs have dramatic and cinematic qualities, and he often has an extensive support crew on site for proper staging and lighting.
Cindy Sherman
(born 1954)
Sherman is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, putting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters, often amusing, disturbing, distasteful and affecting. She was a central figure in 1960s performance and body art, in her works she centred on her own body and her position as female subject and object. She is one of the most influential contemporary artist. Her work continually re-examines women’s roles in history and contemporary society but stressing that her photographs don’t have an explicit narrative or message, leaving them untitled and largely open to interpretation.
Alex Prager
(born 1979)
Alex Prager (born 1979)
American art photographer and filmmaker known for her cinematic colour photography. Prager finds her inspiration in the city of Los Angeles. Her work often uses trained actors in staged settings, acting out ambiguous melodramatic narratives in colourful costumes. Prager’s works cross the worlds of art, fashion, photography and film exposing the human melodrama. By using an aerial perspective, she purposefully pushes the viewer into a position of surveillance, offering an optimal viewpoint to observe the characters in her frames.
Ernst Haas
(1921-1986)
Austrian American photojournalist and colour photographer. Haas was known for his commercial work – he was the first to photograph a Marlboro Man. Haas cropped and abstracted, photographed against the light and out of focus, and used reflections and close-ups to mystify the visible. He was often shooting away from the subject at acute and unexpected angles and frequently employed techniques like shallow depth of field, selective focus and blurred motion to create evocative metaphorical work.
Sam Taylor-Wood OBE
(born 1967)
Contemporary British filmmaker and photographer. Interested in relationship between identity and appearance, her work examines the contradictions between our interior lives and our exterior presentations of the self. Taylor-Wood was awarded the title of Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to British arts and culture in 2011. She is one of the members of the visual artists’ group known as Young British Artists, a group who initially began to exhibit in 1988 in London. Nominee for the Turner Prize, winner of the Illy Café Prize in Venice Biennale 1997 for the category of the Most Promising Young Artist. Her famous films are Nowhere Boy (a biographical drama about John Lennon’s adolescence – the film was nominated for four BAFTAs) and Fifty Shades of Grey.
William Eggleston
(born 1939)
American photographer, one of the first serious photographers to explore the potential of colour. He is largely credited with legitimizing colour photography as a fine art form. His photographs monumentalise everyday subject matter, such as a motel rooms and storefronts. Each detail is important, potentially carrying beauty and mystery. His photographs are deeply influenced by the burgeoning suburbs and its accompanying car culture; Eggleston often shot through the window of a moving vehicle.
Francesca Woodman
(1958-1981)
American photographer mainly photographed herself, often nude, in empty interiors in a not traditional self-portraits. She is usually half hidden by objects or furniture or appears as a blur. The images convey an underlying sense of human fragility and her pictures are thoughtfully staged. She created an imagined reality through her use of locations, lighting, clothing, props and her own body. Her pictures are mainly black and white and she uses photographic effects such as blurring caused by slow shutter speeds. Francesca committed suicide in 1981, at the age of just 22.
Identify photographic resources to complete a photographic project (AC 2.1)
The current situation of living under the lockdown has been challenging for all of us. It helped us to re-evaluate our everyday life, everyday habits, needs as well as relationships on many levels.
For my project Home sweet home I aim to concentrate on places, subjects and family members with my home. I plan to use different techniques like playing with light and shadows, using a different shutter speed/long exposure, various aperture settings and shooting at different angles to put subjects/situation into new perspectives. It will be a challenge for me as I prefer to be behind my camera and not in the picture.
Sources: Internet, book: Art and Photography, edited by D.Campany
