Another interesting area of photography and Photoshop I stumbled onto was how much it has changed over the years. How people reacted to edited photos in the past and how they react to them now.
An interesting example of this would have to be ‘The Cottingley fairies’ this is a very famous story of a series of 5 photographs made by two cousins in 1917. These photos got allot of attention in the 1920’s as people questioned whether the images were genuine or fake.
It took until the 1980’s for the two girls to admit the pictures were fake one of the girls however remained adamant that the 5th photo was real.
I found this interesting as this idea of questioning whether photographs were real or fake was going on way back in the 1920’s. I’m looking into people reactions and whether people were more susceptible to fake imaging back then as the technology was rare and not as good. Whereas now the technology is better and in most cases there are no glimpses of where you can see an image could have been edited. There is no way to tell they are fake at all, but we are all far too aware of the technology to believe anything we see that could possibly not be real. We all automatically assume that Photoshop has been used.
Clare strand is another artist I am looking at specifically her pieces ‘Girl in two halves’ and ‘Aerial Suspension’.
These are again utilizing different Photoshop techniques and other things that I am able to achieve using Photoshop. I like the idea of using Photoshop to manipulate images; removing limbs / ropes that hold a person or the frame of a swing or a slide. Making people question how I achieved the final image and hopefully how they look so lifelike.
I think these pieces both touch on the uncanny where the use of Photoshop has worked to make an image almost too real but our knowledge of photo manipulation reminds us they aren’t real.
“Girl in Two Halves and Aerial Suspension allude to trick photography and its fraught relationship to magic and the visualisation of the mysterious, the unseen or the spiritual. The images are intended to be simultaneously believed and disbelieved.” Strand, C. (2011).
This is a quote from Clare Strand at her exhibition Falling Up: The Gravity of Art in the Courtauld Institute, London it states how magic and trick photography go hand in hand to create mystery. So it looks like ‘magic’ or someone has edited the photo… Like magic, people can choose to believe it or find out how it was done and find the trick.
Looking into other artists to further inspire my work and ideas I came across this piece by Joel-peter Witkin. As it has an obvious relation to my work with a suspended girl. However after further analysis of this piece I discovered that that was the only thing this had in common with my work.
The work of Witkin is more abject than graceful; much of his work is disturbing and hard to look at.
The work of Within did give me ideas that I could experiment with in some of my photographs for example; the position the model hangs on the ropes, as well as the different backgrounds I could use and also the idea to maybe leave the ropes in some of my images.
I feel like this particular artist isn’t the type of road I want to go down and as he has only produced this one piece in this way it does not give me the volume of work I need to do proper artist research from.
My main artist inspiration would have to be Sam Taylor-Wood. I started looking at some of her work in my A-level art then moved on from her at the start of my degree however I find myself constantly coming back to her artwork and becoming inspired.
At first I was just making sculptures and paintings of her photographs, I have now found that my passion lies in photography and installation. I have found a lot of interest in experimenting with Taylor-Woods theories in real life installations and photographs. I tried experimenting with how I could create images to look as graceful as the work she has done without possessing the expertise, tools and experience she has with photo editing technology.
I started by experimenting in water. I found the waters movement made the body and hair appear weightless and graceful. The use of the balloons in this piece was to keep an obvious link to Sam Taylor-Woods work as she uses balloons in a similar way in her ‘Escape Artist’ Pieces. Also the balloons are an obvious relation to weightless I wanted it to appear like it was the balloons that were holding her up in the water.
I then moved on from this, I wanted to achieve what she had achieved in a more similar fashion. She had hung up a model in here studio and then later digitally removed the strings. So I experimented with this technique hanging up a model on strings in a safe environment and then later digitally removing the strings in Photoshop after. Although I was happy with these results as a first attempt it was only a tester and the results are not as good as they could have been with more professional equipment, knowledge of Photoshop and time put into photo editing.
