My Visual Logbook

Tonight I shot the final images for my diversity now brief. I used a friend of a friend as a model as I thought she really embodies diversity and has an alternative take on beauty.

I really liked the blue from my previous experiment and it worked really well again with the idea of body form more so than the darker purple or the yellow.

The close crop of my images is partly because I was using paper backgrounds which were limited in size, at A2. I had this same problem with the final images which I used for my rough cut brief.
However, I do really like the crop and I shoot alot of the time with a 50mm lens which means I have a similar crop throughout my work.

The brief asks for 1-4 images, I plan to submit three, of the same model, because they work really well together. I will adjust the blues so that they match too.
I'm really happy with these images and I had today marked as my last day to shoot any images for my three projects, and I've definitely got enough to work with, its a nice relief that I can now focus on getting everything ready for submission and focus on my written work too, including the essay.

When looking for inspiration for simple, minimal documentary style portraits, Andi suggested I looked into Viviane Sassen. Sassen is a fashion and fine art photographer who is known for her use of geometrical shapes within her work. She has been widely published and exhibited. These two portraits from her series Etan & me are incredibly simple, but I love the colours contrast and the composition, the documentary style and how the angles are used to document from every side. This is something I want to do within my diversity brief, keeping everything very samey but using different angles.

On sunday I shot an experiment for my diversity brief. I used a model which had quite a bony body shape, something which I thought could look quite abstract and show how bodies are different. These are the best two outcomes from the shoot, I like them, but think I can produce far better quality of work and hope to do this tonight in the studio. I shot these at home infront of a window using natural light and a A1 paper backdrop.

I took these to my workshop this afternoon, where we presented our work to the rest of the group and got technical feedback. Things brought up were the model looked cold, and you could see hairs. I didn't photoshop these to the highest standard because I wasn't happy with them, but I didn't think the tiny hairs were a problem as it was showing diversity and I'm not going to photoshop every tiny hair out so she looks like a stereotypical model on the front of a magazine because that wasn't the point.

The technical feedback I received for my other briefs was overall quite positive, some I didn't agree with but they were suggestions and its nice to know other peoples opinions.

I found Nadav Kander's faceless portraits for the Samaritans We Listen Campaign commissioned by communications agency MullenLowe on Its Nice That. I really like the angle which the portraits are shot from, and the coloured backgrounds. The campaign also demonstrates diversity with the idea that depression and suicidal thoughts aren't ageist, sexist, or racist.

I want my set of images to have some personality within them, as well as documenting the diversity of the model. I plan to shoot from different angles of the face as well as from behind like these, and just of the models arm where she has tattoos. I think an image like this would work really nicely within a set of three or four images, where other shots display other parts of the body and the models face.

When creating my diversity portraits I am taking a more documentary approach towards my image making. I looked at the work of Thomas Ruff and his typological portraits. He studied at the renowned Düsseldorf Art Academy working under Bernd and Hilla Becher. 

I really like the bottom two and the top right image, the top left is quite muted and doesn't reflect my own style as much. The passport style images emphasise same-ness, however this isn't what I want my images to suggest as the purpose of my images is to promote and document diversity. I am not worried that my images will do the opposite of my intentions as they will not be in a typology, which by nature unifies and equalises people together.
The composition of Ruff's work is something which I want to reference in my own work.

After shooting one of my final sets of images for the first brief I tried to match them up with a landscape to see how they work together and what adjustments need to be made. After matching the tones with one image, it will become easier to do this step by step with the remaining ones. I'm really happy with the outcome of these and how they look together; putting them side by side with a landscape completes the image in a  way and I can see the pairs together in an editorial for a fashion brand or in a magazine.

I'm at the final stages of my first brief and all thats left to do is to make my images look more consistent as a series, and doing this by very subtly adjusting the curves. Its quite a time consuming process for such subtle adjustments as trying to get images I took on different days, months apart in different conditions to look the same is more difficult than I first expected. Despite this, I'm happy with my progress and excited to see how they all look in the end.