InfluencesThere are many examples of photography and painting influencing each other. The interaction is evident in the work of David Hockney and Peter Blake. Tom Hunter has been inspired by classical painting in his photographic work. Make reference to appropriate examples and create your own response to this theme.
Beginnings of photography
TC#5 - Threshold Concept no.5 Photographs are abstractions, shaped by technologyPeople think that photography is a document of the original. Whereas paintings people can clearly see that it is not the original item. This has meant that when we view photographs we tend to see them as replicas rather than interpretations.
TC#1 - Photography has many genres, some old, some borrowed, some newPhotography has many genres, some of which are borrowed from painting (e.g. still life, portraiture, landscape). Some are special to photography (e.g. photojournalism). Artists/photographers often play with our expectations about genre for creative purposes.
Photography has been inspired by its predecessor, painting, however, it also has made new genres, like forensic photography.
Tom Hunter uses the composition of these naturalistic paintings to create his own pieces. There is a question of irony when examining his work, was he trying to have a joke with people who got the reference? Are there multiple interpretations?
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My response |
The Girl With The Pearl Earring
Editing
For this image, I was focused on editing the lighting. This is because I realised that in the Vermeer painting there was a huge contrast between the subject's face and the black background. I chose to use the levels panel to experiment with, raising the 'grey point' to darken the background and highlight the shadows. This created a larger contrast, which is what I was looking for. I then slightly lowered the 'white point' because I felt as though her face was too dark. This lightened her face enough to create the image I was looking for. I think that this editing worked because it created the same shadows and contrast as in the Vermeer. It also helped create the same feel to the final image.
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EvaluationI chose artwork, like Tom Hunter, that was naturalistic. I was interested to use his method of keeping the composition and subject of the pieces relatively the same.
For this series, I did a recreation of Vermeer's 'Girl With the Pearl Earring'. I really enjoyed recreating the painting with exact precision. However, this brought up its own challenges as I had to look at specific composition, lighting and costume. I found that my final photos came out as a mixture of correct composition or correct lighting and my favourite one, on the far right, was slightly different in both but I think captured the original the best. I particularly enjoyed creating this series as I got to work with studio lights and backdrops. I enjoyed focusing on recreating rather than creating. If I did this again I think that I would focus more on composition and lighting, being careful to recreate rather than do what I think looks the best. For example, I didn't notice that Vermeer leaves a lot of space above the subject's head until till I was compared them at the end of the process. Also, I took these photographs horizontally whereas he does it vertically. I chose these three photos because I liked how they, while different, represent the original clearly. The first one is the closest to the original, with the lighting and composition matching the original almost exactly. In the second photograph the lighting is brighter, with fewer shadows on her face, giving it a clearer feel. The final photograph was a modernisation of the original. I particularly like that you can see the original on the phone, reflecting the fact that nothing is original now, it's just a concoction of other images. I think that this was my most successful set of photographs. However, I feel that, because I'm simply replicating, it lacks personal meaning or interpretation and this is why I haven't used it as my final piece. |
Jeff Wall
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My Response |
John William Godward - The Favourite
Editing
I chose to edit my image to make it lighter, in an effort to simulate it being outside. I decided to do this because I liked the lack of shadows and how everything was clearly outside and light. For this, I lightened the 'gray point' and lightened the 'black point'. This lightened the image altogether, but I thought that the contrast was too large. I then reduced the contrast by 10, evening out the contrasts in the photograph and took away the harsher light points like the white of the cat's fur.
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EvaluationThis was fairly similar to the process used in creating the images inspired by Tom Hunter. However, I noticed that Jeff Wall isn't as strict with his replication. He is more focused on referencing rather than replicating.
For this one, I decided to John William Godward's 'The Favourite'. I found this through searching around gallery websites for naturalistic paintings. I didn't have a widespread knowledge of specific pieces before I started, so I decided to look around for them. I chose this one because I liked the connection between the woman and the cat. Using Jeff Wall as inspiration, I was allowed more freedom in terms of recreating it. I decided to not have the woman in the painting but to use the red dress as I liked the colours, which referenced the colours in her dress. I used my own cat whose ginger fur looked similar to that of the picture. I chose to shoot it during the day so that the lighting was similar to that in the original. The tree on the dress is appropriate and is why I chose it because it simulates the photograph being taken outside and connected it to nature as the woman in the original is. The sofa is in contrast to the marble bench in the original, as it is worn and simple, whereas the marble is fresh and stylistic. I was inspired to change the setting drastically by Tom Hunter who modernises his responses. This was in an effort to contemporise the painting. I chose these photographs because they most accurately depict the original, which is what I wanted from this response. However, I think that this set was my least successful. In retrospect, I think this was because I spent less time over the details in these pictures compared with my other sets of photographs. I also think that the lack of a human subject lead me to be less careful about the positioning of the items. I suspect that there was nothing in this shoot that I felt a connection with; this disconnection has definitely affected how long I spent correcting the composition, lighting and subjects. |
John Singer Sargent - Seated Musicians
Editing
For this image, I focused on the lack of background in the Sargent painting and the impact of the red cloak as the main source of colour. I lightened the contrast by increasing it by 20, thus allowing me to lower the white and gray points and raise the black point. This darkened the background to almost entirely black but kept the faces bright. This process also highlights the red cloak, which I felt was an important focal point of the original painting.
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EvaluationFor this piece, I chose John Singer Sargent's 'Seated Musicians'. I decided to use a studio setting, as the original painting has no distinct background. This made me think that the painter was only focused on the foreground characters. I used this idea when creating my response. I was inspired by Tom Hunter's use of replication, so I posed my subjects in the same way as the original, bringing an obvious link between the photograph and its stimulus. I wanted this series to be modernised. Therefore, they are wearing modern clothes and hairstyles. Just as the three figures in the painting represent musicians in the time the painting was made, I wanted my photographs to be contemporary. I thought that this was important because it was an interpretation and I was using the inspirations that are around, like the modern styles to determine my work. I used this painting because I liked the contrast to the other very naturalistic paintings I had chosen, but this one was still clearly a painting of people in specific poses. I liked this contrast as well, the obvious posing against the stylistic painting approach.
I chose these as the best ones because as examples of my photography they simply turned out the best: the focus was sharp, and the subjects were in the poses that I thought reflected the original the best. The first one is my preferred one as the subjects, although different from the original, capture the essence of the people in the painting. |
Peter Blake |
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My Photos for collagingI was inspired to create a very personal collection of photographs, choosing a combination of influential people from different areas such as politics, cinema, music, theatre, literature and exposé. I wanted to display them in a prominent place and chose to use a stage, as if presenting them to the world.
My ResponseCreating a response for this was slightly more challenging than the previous two sets of photographs. I was comfortable making heavily staged, organised photographs, as above. Whereas this made me step back and create a piece without taking photographs instead using different pieces of art to create a new piece.
Evaluation I enjoyed creating this response as it allowed me to do something that I don't normally do. It was interesting looking at the photographs not from a creating process but from a selection process. I found choosing the images difficult, as I realised that I needed to make them look as if they were standing behind one another. I realised that I didn't find enough full-length people, so it does look like they're floating. I thought it was interesting to include photographs that were both in colour and black and white, as this breaks the apparent illusion that they're together. I chose to put them onto a stage setting because it simulates their position in society, that people are watching them and seeing how they act and what they say. I chose the stage from the Broadway production 'Hamilton' partly because it was unclear of the decade in which it was set and also because it was plain, so that there weren't distractions from the people. I included fictional characters to represent the influence that fiction has on people, and how we can change our minds based on things which aren't real. If I did it again I would have more people and be more focused on scaling and having a row of people who have full bodies to make the illusion of them being together more real.
David Hockney
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Eugène Delacroix - Flowers
Editing
For this image I was focused on composition, particularly editing out the roots of the flowers. I noticed after the shoot that you could clearly see that they were cut flowers. The first thing that I did was to crop these out. This removed the distraction from the image and allowed a focus on the lighting. I then used the settings to experiment with the lighting. I decided to lower the 'gray point'. This darkened the photo, which I thought made it more dramatic and closer to the original, as it has very prominent shadows with the bottom half being mostly in shadow.
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I then lowered the contrast to bring the lighter tones closer together, lightening the whole image. My final step was the lighten the shadows by 10%. This may seem contradictory, as the original is mostly shadow, but I felt that my image, because of the black background needed less shadow to create a greater contrast between the background and the flowers.
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EvaluationThis piece was inspired by Jeff Wall and Tom Hunter. I liked the way that Jeff Wall takes the shapes from paintings and uses this to create his pieces and so I used this process in having the flowers in the same shapes as they are in the original. I liked the way that he also takes little aspects, so I used the colour red from the original and the composition of the red flowers in my response. I liked the way that Tom Hunter modernises his work, so I used a granite workspace as my background to give it a more modern feel and used more currently popular flowers. I chose this painting as it countered most of my others in that the subject wasn't a person. I liked this as I usually work with people and so this change added new experiences as I could manipulate the flowers in any way that I needed to without having to worry about this part of the process.
I chose these three photographs as the best because they reflected different things about my response process. The first one is the most Tom Hunter-like as there are more obvious parallels with the original. In the second photograph I was interested in looking at David Hockney in the sense that he is interested in how human vision works. So I distorted the viewing of the flowers. The last photograph is most influenced by Jeff Wall, in that I included the red flower as the reference to the original to create a parallel to it but it's not as strict a reflection. |
Lego Paintings
Eugène Delacroix - Liberty Leading the People
EvaluationIn creating a photograph based on Delacroix's famous painting of Liberty, I chose to create a lego styled series because I liked the way that they are so interchangeable. This allowed me to adapt them to fit the setting that I was using. I was inspired to create another series without a human subject after the previous one. I found that being able to adjust the subjects without having any worries over time or comfort was easier and allowed me to spend longer over specific details.
For this set of photographs, I focused on the female lead. I wanted her to be the main subject in focus, to reflect her central place in the original painting. She is the title character, highlighting her importance. The only other character I wanted in focus was the boy next to her. This is because I felt that their relationship in the painting was key. I was inspired by Tom Hunter's fairly strict replication in terms of composition and attempted to replicate the composition of the original as far as possible. I chose to take this outside as it is in the original, using the grass because it covered half of them, as the bodies do in the Delacroix painting. I used a very mixed set of characters in the shot. I chose these three photographs because they reflected the different styles I was thinking of. The first two are different compositions of the Tom Hunter style of stricter composition. The third is a play on Hockney's exploration of vision: the subject of the photograph dramatically out of focus, allowing you to still see that they are there, and you can easily identify the flag. |
Final Piece
Covert Flinck - A Young Archer
Editing
I thought that it would be interesting to try and get the colouring closer to the original, it felt as if it were sepia but lighter. So I used photoshop and experimented with the colour settings until I got this yellow hue.
I also experimented with contrast, lighting and cropping. At first, I attempted to get the images as close to the original as possible but I ended up deciding to leave them as I'd taken them because I liked that they were referencing but not replicating. For both of the edits, I did the same thing. I added a layer and then went on the colourise hue. I then chose a sepia coloured filter. This took away the colourings of the subject's shirt and hair which I thought was an interesting layer on the otherwise colourless photo. I decided to use the eraser with an opacity of 40% to remove some of the hue over the highly coloured areas. This created a nice contrast over the image and the black background. For the second portrait, this process made the shadows across the face too dark, so I raised the 'gray points' lightening the lighting around her face. |
EvaluationI was drawn to Covert Flinck's A Young Archer when I went to the Wallace Collection with the Creative Writing group. I saw this painting and wrote a story about the boy. We learned that he was a slave who was dressed up by his owners to pose for a painting. This story gave me two ideas which I thought would be interesting to realise simultaneously. The first story is shown through the photographs on the top row. This is the story of the hidden abuse that the boy suffered. Although you cannot see it in the painting, it is clearly there as he was a slave and a child. I had the idea to flip this over and to have the abuse as visible as I could make it. I used stage makeup to bruise and cut the subject's face to make her look beaten, rather than have it hidden. The second story, in the bottom row, is that he was dressed up to be something he wasn't. I had the idea to dress up the second subject in overly dressy clothes and makeup that was shiny and pink. This new outward image allowed me to explore the idea that she has been dressed up and was being perceived as something that she is not. I thought that these two opposites made for a nice contrast to the original painting. My intention is that when looking at it, the viewer can see both subjects' discomfort with the situations that they're in.
I have been influenced by Tom Hunter and Jeff Wall to create this final piece. Tom Hunter uses the composition of the original and for my first piece that is definitely true. I had her sitting the same way as the boy and placed evenly within the frame as to mirror the original. In the second I had her centralised in the image but she takes up the same space as the Archer boy, creating an obvious parallel between the painting and my photographs. Through this final piece, I have explored the themes of abuse and hidden identities and how easy it is to appear to be something you are not. Throughout the project, I have experimented a lot with different styles (portrait, macro flowers, collages) and different techniques (micro, scanning, studio). I found that I have had most success in a studio setting where I have control over the variables and can easily manipulate the setting to fit my needs. I also found that my most successful pieces have been portraits. I think this is because it is the genre that I enjoy the most to use, which means that I will make the most of the people who are posing. I developed my investigation through trying different methods and started with my second most successful images, but I thought that if I changed genre I would be able to get better outcomes. I ended up going back to where I started and making a portrait,. However, I think that trying other methods made my portraits better as I was able to focus on a wider range of issues. For example, the Liberty lego photograph made me think about focus and how changing it changes the tone of the image. I have decided to have my photographs printed on 20" by 30" prints and without frames because I wanted to have them as physical object. This gave the portraits some depth and allowed more in depth spectatorship. I chose to have them done that size because I felt that they needed that scale to be viewed as I had intended, with the large issues taking up a large amount of space. If I had more time, I think that I may have done more looking at paintings, as I don't have a large knowledge of these, so I had to look through gallery websites like the Tate. This meant that I was limited by these, so expanding my knowledge of paintings would have helped. |