Do your own research into some of the photographers mentioned in this project.
Gianluca Cosci came to London from rural Italy, on arrival the cultural shock he experienced was immense, he was fascinated yet repulsed by some of the obscene wealth in the city. He created a series of images called “Panem et Circenses”. In an interview in April 2016 he stated “my series Panem et Circenses was taken exclusively around the Millennium Dome which at that time was a depressing no man’s land after being open for only 12 months in 2000. It was Blair’s vanity project to boost his image as “presidential” prime minister. That white elephant with a price tag of nearly one billion pounds of tax payers’ money was standing empty while he was declaring war against Iraq” Cosci G (b1970). This was what inspired his collection. All the images were taken with a very shallow depth of field, his focal points within his images were all very minute, from a leaf to a crack in the pavement, he photographed them all from very low viewpoints. I liked his images, his lens technique was superb, very prescise, however I don’t think I could have worked out what he was trying to say if I hadn’t done the research.
Kim Kirkpatrick lives and works in the Washington D. C. area of the USA. He is a landscape photographer who took many of his images in and around industrial and construction areas. In a 2001 interview he said, “I take pictures where nature and man meet, where one is taking over the other” Kirkpatrick K (b1952). In his early work he concentrated on the ‘Bokeh’ effect capturing strong colours and extremely shallow depths of field, he made dreary uninteresting objects into beautiful compositions, his technique was remarkable, especially the way the foreground and background were balanced so perfectly.
Guy Bourdin was born in Paris, his parents separated while he was still an infant, so he was brought up by his grandparents until his father remarried. Then he moved in with them and his siblings. Every time his mother telephoned him his father or stepmother would lock him into a telephone booth to talk to her, this made him really angry in later life. He recollects only seeing his mother on one occasion and his memory of her was “of a made up elegant Parisienne with pale skin and pale red hair” Bourdin G (1928 – 91). This influenced his photography immensely, you see many of his model subjects with pale skin and red hair. Bourdin was a fashion photographer for Vogue for many years, however many of his own images, although they are very beautiful, colourful and stunning, had a very dark and risqué side to them. He was classed as one of the first surrealist photographers and this was demonstrated countless times in a great deal of his work.
Look back at your personal archive of photography and try to find a photograph that could be used to illustrate one of the aesthetic codes discussed in Project 2. Whether or not you had a similar idea when you took the photograph isn’t important; find a photo with a depth of field that ‘fits’ the code you’ve selected. The ability of photographs to adapt to a range of usages is something we’ll return to later in the course.
Add the shot to your learning log and include a short caption describing how you’ve re-imagined your photograph.
When this image was taken I was experimenting with different depths of field, if I re-shot the image again I would compose it slightly differently, I would make the shallow depth of field sections shallower, and expose more of the deeper depth of field.
Jo's Photo Blog 