The artist I chose to base my photos off of was Mark Seliger. The reason I chose him was because I think all of his work is extremely powerful. I originally picked him because I enjoy black and white portraiture but, the more I looked into his entire body of work, the more I realized that all of his photos are extremely interesting.
The main connection that I was trying to make to his work with my photographs was to his lighting techniques. His color photography is made up of very strong color pallets but is almost muted in a way. You look at it and you know that the colors are there but its as though there's a haze over them. I liked this because it makes the photos more than just your average magazine shoot and adds a level of mystery to them. His black and white photography is very stark but the lighting he uses gives it a softness. I really enjoy his lighting techniques because they leave you wanting to know more about the person or object in the photograph. The other thing about his body of work that caught my attention was the subject matter. While Seliger is known mostly for his portraiture he also creates extremely successful still life photography. I find it amazing that his still life's can tell just as much of a story as his portraiture and I tried to portray that with my photographs.
My work attempts to relate to Seliger's through the subject matter and the lighting techniques. I tried to use the softness of his lighting and the intensity of his shadows in sets of two photos, one color and one black and white. I also did one still life and one portrait in each set. While Seliger doesn't seem to have many self portraits I chose to use them because I knew exactly what I had in mind for the project and tried it with a few other people and couldn't seem to get it right. This assignment was rather challenging for me because I think the photographer I chose has a very clean and unique style but I enjoyed learning more about him and hope my photographs reflect his work.
One word comes to mind with this shoot and that is "mystical". Your use of that, i don't even know what it is, mesh material maybe, made the atmosphere of the shoot extremely alluring. It drew me in the same way that moth is drawn to a light. Your poses really complimented the mood of the photos as well. You took the female form and portrayed it in a way that was almost goddess like. The color to black and white contrast was a very nice touch as well. It let the viewer really take in what they were looking at before we viewed it with the fantasy style black and white filter. Excellent shots!
ReplyDeleteYour black and white ones are stunning and you are so pretty! Although the order or the story line confused me a bit, they match each other beautifully! Also, the ones with the roses is my favorite. It really looks like a collage or painting. I almost wish to see more of the tungsten look in the photos, but i'm biased toward tungsten.
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