Apparently

So apparently since everyone seemed to hate my work i'm going to try to start building sets again. I've been looking at a lot of fashion photography and how they make their sets. It seems to me that the most interesting ones are the ones with strange and random things. I remember paul saying something about putting random objects in with the shoot, but i've been so caught up in trying to use objects that at least symbolize something. As obvious as i've tried making my symbolism, I can't seem to dumb it down enough to where people actually pay attention. Perhaps if I put random things that really don't mean anything to me in the shot then people will go "oh, genious!" and interpret it their own way. I enjoy making sets, it's just that they can become very costly and worsen my "pack rat" condition. I have a problem with returning things.......I never do haha. So anyways, here are a few images to show what i'm going for in the future.











































Silvia Puntino is who i'm primarily intrigued by. She did the images that are all white. She has a similar style. I love her use of the sterile white and then also the creamy, off white in the other. Because of the coloring and lighting in each they come off as creepy to me. Especially the one in the abandoned house. I find that in almost all of my images I always choose to have my models staring straight at me with no expression. That blank stare leave so much open for me. She seems to do the same with her models. Then also the one of hers that's on the dirt mount caught my attention just because of the odd placement of the model, and the other character.

The last one on the bottom was done by Carl Bengsston. I chose this image of his because it of course is obviously very influenced by painting. I love his muted colors and composition. He could have cut in a lot closer and it would possibly trick you into believing it was a painting, but he chose to keep a little bit of the actual scene to show the set up. I've tried doing something similar a few times, but I have a hard time with it. I'm not sure if the reality of the situation is something I want to show. Never the less, I love that one shot.

New work

Here's an image from a new set that I am working on.
I like the idea of making images that are aesthetically pleasing but still have a subtle macabre element to them. Doing this gives me the best of both worlds that i'm interested in. I still use the fashion/glamour aesthetic that appeals to me as well as the horror/macabre element that I love.

Mortality

Lately i've been very interested in the idea of mortality. I think it's easy to become obsessed with it, that is why most people probably don't think about death. One could either think of it as a scary event or as a beautiful and peaceful event. I think that is what I keep trying to incorporate into my photographs I just hadn't realized it.
I started looking up memento mori and the art associated with it and it really intrigued me. That led me into danse macabre paintings and also a style of paintings called Vanitas. All of these things remind us of how short life is, and that we will all eventually die. For some reason I keep going back to paintings for inspiration. I'm not quite sure what it is about them that I relate to so much. I've never really been good at painting, i've just always admired them.

Su Friedrich

I attended Su Friedrich's lecture, but was only able to catch about half of it. I'm not really much of an abstract film person, and I didn't quite understand the films she showed. They seemed very hectic and didn't seem to pertain to what she was talking about, at least to me. I'm really not one for abstract art, and films like one of the ones she showed that was just random words coming in and out really bother me. I don't know what it is about films like that but I just can't handle it; almost to the point of getting anxiety from them.

I tried looking through her website to get a better idea of what she was about but didn't get very much out of it. I don't have sound on my computer so I couldn't watch any of her clips, so I tried looking through her 4 bios. They listed a whole bunch of films she has made and awards and museums that have her work, but I didn't find too much about her actual work. A lot of it seems to be feminist? I saw a few awards that pertained to gay and lesbian awards, and to museums that had that kind of thing, but I didn't get that impression from her when I was at the lecture.

Maybe I would have gotten into it more if I had been able to stay longer for the lecture, but from the impression I got I was uninterested in her work.

Work work work...

So here's what i've been working on recently...

With this one I am speaking about reality. There are two kinds of reality in my opinion. The reality of everyday life and the lies we live, and also the reality that we are only human.





This one i'm not quite sure about yet. There are some other poses that I think will work better with my concept, but I just liked this one in itself. There are a few more things that i'm working on but haven't finished editing yet.


After looking at Erwin Olaf's work, i'm trying to get some more ideas for shots I want. I bought a big bottle of liquid latex the other day for the shoot that has half the face bloodied up, and I want to experiment more with that. So I guess right now i'm in the organizing phase again; i'm trying to gather a bunch of materials and props to experiment with and hopefully that'll give me an idea of what I want to do. So I guess we'll see what happens.


FYI:Latex smells horrible.

Recent Work

So I have decided to go a different route with the religious themes I was going with before. I'm still going to have religious cues here and there, but I want to take it back to my gore. After the first critique I realized that the ideas I had for the jesus thing just weren't sticking to me. Doing my gore/macabre work is what really motivates me and keeps my attention, and it's what I really love so i'm going for it.
After looking at my past work I realized that all of it is violence towards women. I hadn't really thought about that, especially when I was making the work. I want to go deeper into this and try to understand maybe why it is that I make images like that. As far as I know i'm not for violence against women, I think it is wrong........but for some reason that seems to be my subject. I know i'm fascinated by power, so maybe this power men have over women, and this dominance is something that could be sparking these images.

Fellow VCU Artist

I respect a lot of the artists at VCU, but there aren't really any that stick out in my head. I haven't seen many artists from the other departments, so it's hard for me to pick out one person whom I admire a lot. In that respect I am kind of blocked into the photography department.

Although, Shanna Merrolla(sorry if I spelled the last name wrong)'s work always seems to capture me. There's something about the colors she uses and her composition that really puts me in a weird mood; but I like it. Her style is unmistakable, I can always tell it is her work. Something that also impresses me about her is how passionate she is about her artwork. It's really a process for her and I think it's neat the way she goes about creating her artwork. She's one of the only ones I know of that seems to find beauty in strange things, similar to me but in a much different way at the same time.

So I guess if I had to pick one person whom I really admire, it would be Shanna.

Interpretations is something I am going to be focusing on for my conceptual series; specifically interpretations of the bible and jesus. Even more specifically, MY interpretations of the bible and jesus.
I suppose my motives are to in a way, undermine the hero. I do not think that jesus was any sort of special person. In fact, I think he was probably some sort of looney man that started a "cult-like" following. For people to base their life off of him and a book of "stories" is baffling to me.
The images that I am going to produce are going to be symbolic and contemporary. Everything I put into the image is going to be there for a certain reason. This is something new for me so I view it as a challenge.
For lighting technique I am going to take largely from Philip-Lorca diCorcia's style. Specifically from this image. I like the darkness surrounding the subject, almost like a spotlight. It could be taken different ways and I would like to play with that in my images.


Conceptually, I like Duane Michals approach. In his "Christ in New York" series, I enjoy his jesus figure witnessing these horrible real life things that happen. Praying won't save you from real life.









I enjoy Les Krims depiction here. To me it pokes fun at religion. For some of my images, I want it to be me poking fun at certain aspects (which I haven't decided yet.)









Annie Leibovitz's color in this depiction of the Last Supper is similar to the color pallete I want to incorporate. It reminds me of older religious paintings and their muted colors.

Distractions

So I have still been trying to plan out photo ideas for this series, but all of the images I think up in my head don't go along with the series I had thought of before. They are still under the same general concept, but they are straying a bit. I am still keeping with jesus and christianity as my main subject, and i'm still trying to figure out ways of making them contemporary but I don't think i'm going to do the time line type sequence I was thinking of before.
I thought of doing a series of "jesus" doing all the things he wanted to do. Portraying him as human, because that is what he was. He was no god, no son of god; he was a person. I see religion(specifically christianity) as a constraint. The religion puts fear into people so that they follow these certain rules or else they're going to hell. Why not live in the moment? Why live by a book? That seems so silly to me. You only live once, so do what makes you happy. Carpe Diem.
I don't know if I want to make the whole series based in this one idea, but I suppose I just want it to be incorporated. I have a few other Ideas, but I guess i'll have to wait and see how they work together.

Visiting Artist Lecture

So I went to the lecture not really knowing what to expect mainly because I haven't had any exposure to someone in that field. I honestly didn't know that for a lot of movies the sounds were recorded in a completely different setting...I don't know if that's common knowledge but I didn't know haha. Ann seemed extremely in tune with her surroundings, like she could hear the slightest pin drop and also appreciate the small sound it made. It was pretty interesting listening to her, however it was a little difficult at points because of the way she spoke.
I don't have much to say about it other than that. I don't know much about the whole process of recording stuff so I was kind of in the dark when she was talking about different microphones and whatnot. After it was over I was trying to pay more attention to sounds so I guess she had some effect on me.

The end.

Captive Honour

So my direction for what I want to do this semester has changed. I've been listening to Megadeth since I was in a car accident. The car I am driving now only has a tape player and one of the only tapes I have is Megadeth. Anyways, while driving a lyric stuck in my head.

"And when you kill a man, you're a murderer
Kill many, and you're a conqueror
Kill them all ... Ooh ... Oh you're a God!"


Kill them all, you're a god. That stuck in my head. Then the question of what makes a god a god came to me. The train of thought I ended up with led me to wanting to depict my own "theories" on the story of jesus. Where he started and where he ended. Now, even though I am an avid atheist, I do believe that there was a person named jesus of course, but I think the stories we have of him today are a bunch of bs and have over the years been extremely distorted. People live their lives based on his and I think that is wrong. People should live their lives based on their own because his probably was nothing like it is portrayed to be.

My goal with this series in the making is to 1)Amuse myself 2)Make strong statements on my thoughts about religion 3)Hopefully offend some people even though this shouldn't, and 4) be able to put together scenes where everything is symbolic of something, kind of in the same vein as Joel Peter Witkin.

Thoughts

I find that most of my ideas or thoughts come to me while I am either driving, or waiting to fall asleep. The other night while driving home, I thought to myself for whatever reason, what the different between drug addicts and digital photographers was. I'm not quite sure what prompted this thought, but I was able to come up with a lot of similarities between the two which I thought to be a little odd. I also thought about how people who use things like myspace or any of the like websites were similar to drug addicts. I thought about it the whole way home and as soon as I got home I just started typing my thoughts.
Since that night I have been trying to think about possible ways to show these obsessions thought photographs and say something about it. I have a few ideas, but I'm not quite sure where I want to take this.
I'm torn on what I want to pursue for this senior portfolio class. I love doing my gore work and want to work on that more, and I also would like to work on fashion type stuff, as well as this one idea but i'm not sure which.

I need direction. Where is my compass....hmm.

Peter Beste


Joel Peter Witkin



Mehmet Turgut


Where I am now, I see myself as a photographer who is focused mainly on aesthetics. Some deep meaning behind a photograph doesn't concern me as much. However I would like to start incorporating it into my work. I find that the things i enjoy creating the most are reminiscent of stills from horror movies.
What i'm looking to do in the future however is quite different. My main goal is to be a fashion photographer of sorts. The main reason for that is the money, but at the same time it's of some interest to me because i'll be almost guaranteed attractive models, and I also enjoy elaborate sets. I guess I enjoy storyline as opposed to some "deep meaning."

The photographers who inspire me most are Joel Peter Witkin, Peter Beste, and Mehmet Turgut. I don't find huge similarities in my work compared to theirs, but I do admire and respect their work. I admire Witkin the most because of the detail he puts into his photographs and how so many different components of his photographs have a meaning to them. Mehmet is a more contemporary photographer that I respect because of the way he uses movement, color, and facial expressions. I don't find a whole lot of meaning in his work, it is more aesthetically pleasing to me.