Portrait Definition
A portrait is a photograph, painting, drawing, sculpture or engraving of a person. Usually including their face, head and shoulders. This can also be a portrait of yourself (a self portrait) in a mirror, with a timer, or just by turning the camera on yourself. However, portraiture can be much more than that as you can include a person's emotions, culture, identity and personality in the image as well as just physical appearance. This can be done through composition, lighting, clothing, body language and other things in the photo.
What makes me unique
The things that make me unique are my environment and people around me. I grew up with my mum and brother who have both made an influence on my preferences in music, clothing and other aspects. They are both very creative and love art and design, influencing me to become creative also. My parents lived in Japan for a few years, which has made me interested in Japanese culture and caused me to eat Japanese and Asian food very often. Living in London has made me a more independent person because, as opposed to living in the countryside, i travel on my own an can access everything on my own without a parent.
Selfie
A self-portrait would usually be taken with more thought, and take more time to set up and establish. While a selfie can be more spontaneous an is taken for a more fun and light- hearted reason. Also, a selfie is almost always taken on a device like a phone or ipad, not a DSLR or SLR camera because phones are on you most of the time. In a way they are the same thing but a selfie could be considered as a sub genre of the self-portrait.
In this task, we had to take our own selfies an put them into three different categories. The first category is mirror selfies which basically required us to take selfies in any reflection you can find. The second category is shadow selfies which meant that we had to take photos including shadow in some way. This could be a photo of your own shadow on something else or a selfie of a shadow on you. The third category is distorted selfies, which menas photos of yourself but with an alteration in your face. For example, some of your face is covered or blurred. In these photos we still had to keep composition in mind as we wanted these selfies be interesting.
In this task, we had to take our own selfies an put them into three different categories. The first category is mirror selfies which basically required us to take selfies in any reflection you can find. The second category is shadow selfies which meant that we had to take photos including shadow in some way. This could be a photo of your own shadow on something else or a selfie of a shadow on you. The third category is distorted selfies, which menas photos of yourself but with an alteration in your face. For example, some of your face is covered or blurred. In these photos we still had to keep composition in mind as we wanted these selfies be interesting.
Mirror selfie
Shadow
Distorted
Facial recognition
Myra Greene
Myra Greene is an American photographer who has had many different projects, mostly portraiture about race. These photos are from a project about how individuals are often judged from their skin colour and physical characteristics. She says “throughout my artistic practice, I have returned to the body to explore issues of difference, beauty, physical and emotional recollections as they play out on the surface of the skin.”. In 'Character Recognition', she uses a 19th century process called the wet-plate collodion process because it was used during the time of slavery. It was a time when black people were examined by their features to find out if they were a slave. Greene amplifies and examines this by taking photos of hers and someone else's eyes, nose, mouth and other features in detail. These are photos from that project.
These are my own versions of Myra Greene's portrait images. There are similar close-ups, like of my ear, my mouth, my eyes as well as a photo of my whole face. The photos were taken with the studio lights in front of a white background because if they were taken outside, the light wouldn't have been good enough to see every detail on my face as you also see in Myra Greene's images. I edited them black and white, and tried to alter them to look similar to her photos but as mine were taken on a digital camera and hers are done with a wet-plate process, they look very different in colour and contrast.
These are my prints of my photos. They were printed onto photographic paper with a large, plastic negative which had to be placed on top of the paper, not in the enlarger. I like how it came out because it's quite crisp and has good quality, however Myra Greene's photos have a distorted aspect because of the process she used. There are scratches and marks bordering the images which give a nice aesthetic and is relevent to her ideas in this project, so we tried to recreate this with different processes. For example, one process was to put pieces of tape randomly over the image before exposing it. Another process was to paint on the developer, so you would use a brush to apply developer to the paper instead of putting it in the tray. However, the most effective process was to rub bleach onto th print with a paint brush after it had developed. This made a similar effect to the one in Myra Greene's images.
Light and shadow task
Valerie Kabis
In this task we tried to recreate kabis' work by using a harsh light and pointing it at the model from the side or from below or above. This meant that half of the model's face would be very brightly lit while the other is black much like Valerie Kabis' photos. Another way of imitating her ideas was to use different shutter speeds, making the person's face slightly blurred or distorted like in photo on the right. This one is probably my favourite because of the composition and the fact that you can see two of his face amongst the blur. I think it is the photo that most resembles her photography. At first, the photos I took weren't as that similar because mine are digital and not as contrasted as Valerie's photos are, so I had to edit them in photoshop and increase the contrast and brightness up a lot to match hers. I also cropped one of the images to make it more square because some of Kabis' photos are square.
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Analogue portraits
In this task, we took photos using old analogue cameras, however we didn't use film, we put photographic paper straight into the back of the camera. This means that the photos look similar to pin-hole camera photos because it is a similar process as the light travels through a small hole and is projected onto the paper at the back.One of the cameras was an old medium format camera and the photo I took with it is on the left. This camera created a less clear photo than the box brownie. This is what the other three photos were taken on, and they are slightly clearer and thy have a square image. Two of the photos I took were normal portraits while the other two are double exposures. In total they required round 20 seconds of exposure as we were in the studio light.
Documentary Portrait
Lewis Khan - George Town
These are all photos from Lewis Khan's project 'George Town', it is a large project with photos and video of his neighbour with mental health issues. He spend time with him and while talking and getting to know him, he took photos of him and his daily environment to show us his personality and what he's like in person.The award winning short film he made was an interview of George while showing his environment over the top. He talked mostly about his life and experiences, which shows the audience more about who George actually is behind appearances. If you had seen George in public you would most likely have a different view of him after seeing this project, so it helps you to understand more about people you have never met.
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My Response
This is my recreation of Lewis Khan's 'GeorgeTown'. I did my interpretation on my mum and tried to include the different aspects that describe her in everyday environment. For example, i took photos of a scrapbook she had made while travelling and living in Japan and Eastern Asia because this was an interesting part of her life and influenced her to like that culture. I also included things around the house which described her style like the blue top and bags. My mum is quite artistic so i added images of her art which is around the house. This is a good way of showing her personality because she has shown it in her art herself. She likes gardening so i took photos of her gardening and that environment.
Ben Watts: Big Up
Ben Watts is a British photographer and artist based in New York. He made a lot of work after moving to New York, such as photography in magazines like Elle and Vogue. In 2003, he released his book 'Big Up', which was a series of photographs taken in New York that had been made into collages. He tried to capture the culture of New York in his photographs and bring them to life with the collage techniques. For example, he uses tape to stick photos down, create borders and give the image texture. He also often has lots of different, smaller photos scattered around the page or on top of each other as well as writing anywhere on the page. He often uses oil pastels to give the photo bright colour and make an image stand out. All of these techniques make really interesting photos with a good aesthetic style.
My response
This is my response to Ben Watts' big up portraits. Everyone did a collage using Images of Muhammed Ali and tried to show his strong character through the collage. I used lots of techniques that Ben Watts uses, for example I used lots of tape to place images down and give it the untidy look that Ben watts has.I also used very colourful oil pastels to make Ali staand out and give the collage some colour. This is quite similar to Watts' image with similar colours above. I also added writing as well as placing images over other ones. I think this is quite a good response to Ben Watts' collages because it's quite textured and resembles his style.
The one on the right is my second response to Ben Watts and it includes my own images instead of set photos. We were supposed to show what it's like to live in London in 2020. I think this is an improvement on the first one because it resembles his work more. |
Independent Project
Brief- In this project I want to develop on Ben Watts by using his collage style and techniques. However, i am going to use photos of one person's different body parts and then piece them together with the collage. While I am putting the photos together, I want to change the way they look slightly, distorting their body and figure. I might also place photos from different people together in the same collage.The images will be black and white so I'll add colour with the oil pastels and tape. I'm going to create a series of these collages, each with a different person. Pablo Thecuadro is an example of the kind of collage I mean, however I will focus slightly less on the face and do the whole body.
These are my final collages i made inspired by Pblo Thecuadro and Ben Watts. I collaged different photos of my brother to create different representations of his body. You can clearly see the two artists within each collage because i used techniques from each of the photographers. For example, you can see a lot of Ben Watts' style since i used oil pastels, tape and also used different bases to add my collage onto like a cardboard envelope on no.1, white card on no.2 and a folder divider on no.3. This is something that Ben Watts likes to do with his own work, especially the divider. You can also see aspects which i took from Pablo Thecuadro in the ways i collaged different photos together, layering them on top of eachother. No.2 is the one which resembles pablo Thecuadro most because i ripped half of his face on purpose and then added smaller photos in the gap. Pablo does this in a lot of his photos. I really like how these collages have come out as they are all very vibrant and are all different from eachother, however they would have been even better if the original photos i took had more variety. I have added an image that shows the actual sizes of each piece and a slideshow of all the photos i took.