Process

Ryan McGinley – After being shown a number of his pieces in both the lectures and workshops I became fascinated with McGinley’s portraiture work. I think the way he uses his friends in a lot of his work gives off a sense that the subject is comfortable and is how he can get them in these incredibly intimate situations. I really enjoyed this set of pictures taken by him because of its overall beauty but there seems to be a deeper meaning. The pictures themselves are very pleasing aesthetically and showed me that having shadow in the background can give a really nice effect to a portrait. But also the use of the girl and the wolf together gave me the idea that he was trying to show that mankind and nature can live together in harmony because of the calmness on the subject’s face. I also find the colour palette used within this image very simplistic but it has a lot of effect.

Daniel Meadow – While researching portraiture photographers I came across the work of Daniel Meadow. I really enjoyed Meadow’s concept for his set of images from 1973 to 1974, in which he drove round in a double decker bus creating what he called a national portrait of the English. This meant he would drive round England taking photos of anyone who wanted one. I love this concept because nothing is really set up or prepared he is just taking pictures of ordinary people who all have their own stories and we as an audience are left to think what their story could be. I think Meadow’s work could help me with taking the picture of the stranger because this is technically what he did with the bus and I think what he did was make it a fun activity which can be seen in the faces of the subjects.

Sally Mann – I really enjoy the style of Sally Mann’s images as I think the use of light and shadow gives them a really sense of macabre, especially in these later images of her children. This later style that seems to focus more on decay and death than her earlier work taken of her children which focuses a lot more on family life. This image is my favourite of hers because even though the child is not dead the image makes her look so at peace that the audience doesn’t know if she’s dead or not and it takes a lot of skill to get this effect.

This was one of my first attempts at my self-portrait. Overall I think it’s a good start and I really like the lighting I’ve used for this image. I chose this split lighting because I wanted there to be a prominent shadow on one side of my face and I think this effect came across very well. I wanted to give this effect because I wanted to get across the message to the audience that every person has two sides to them, a light and a dark. I think improvements to this image would be getting the eyes a lot more in focus because they seem quite soft and I maybe could’ve dimmed the light slightly because it’s made my face very white.

This another image from my first studio session. With this image I decided to take a different approach and take it as more of a full body image. I’ve kept the same split lighting to get the shadow effect but I think the placement of the hand really makes the shadow more noticeable on the face. I also like the use of black space from the background in this image because I’m standing off centre.