Final Piece

Her is my final piece and to create this I have merged two artist styles together, Man Ray and Jerry Ueslmann. Both these photographers use double exposure to create their pieces and that is what I have incorporated into this piece. I took the inspiration of the hands and creating a double exposure within them from Jerry Ueslmann, the image that is within the hands is inspired by Man Ray and this is my experiment piece I created to link in with Man Ray. This image fitted quite well as it is an image of a mother and daughter and I situated this image so that each portrait was on each hand and this gave the picture a meaning behind it by coincidence. 

The meaning that I gave this image was that no matter how close you can be there's always gunna be a time where you've gotta part in different directions, this fits both to the hands and also to the mother and daughter as they won't spend their whole life together they will eventually part and go their separate ways.

Man Ray Experiment

In this image I have tried to attempt to replicate Man Ray's work specifically his double exposures. Man Ray in his work would have had to use film/analogue camera to take his images rolled his film back and then taken photos on the same film to get these double exposures but with my images instead of using a film camera I have photoshopped the images to give it the effect that they were taken on a film camera. With this double exposure however there are no contact sheets as these were just a couple of photos which I took while sitting at a coffee shop and these people were not aware that these photos were being taken. 

To create my Man Ray double exposure I simply added the two images below into photoshop and added a black and white filter over the top to keep to the style of Man Ray. I then started to create the double exposure part of the image by moving around the images and the opacity until I felt happy with the composition of the image. After I had done this I picked one of the layers and inverted it as I felt the image didn't look quite look like that of Man Ray's yet and this finished it off.

Here are the original photos that were taken:

Artist Research - Man Ray

Man Ray's career is distinctive above all for the success he achieved in both the United States and Europe. First maturing the the centre of American modernism in the 1910s, he made Paris his home in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the 1940s he crossed the atlantic once again, spending periods in New York and Hollywood. His art spanned painting, sculpture, film, prints and poetry, and in his long career he worked in styles influenced by Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism. He also successfully navigated the worlds of commercial and fine art, and came to be a sought-after fashion photographer. He is perhaps most remembered for his photographs of the inter-war years, in particular the camera-less pictures he call 'Rayographs', but he always regarded himself first and foremost as a painter.

Although he matured as an abstract painter, Man Ray eventually disregarded the traditional superiority painting held over photography and happily moved between different forms. Dada and Surrealism were important in encouraging this attitude; they also persuaded him that the motivating a work of art was more important than the work of art itself. 

For Man Ray, photography often operated in the gap between art and life. It was a means of documenting sculptures that never had a independent life outside the photograph, and it was a means of capturing the activities of his avant-garde friends. His work as a commercial photographer encouraged him to create fine, carefully composed prints, but he would never aspire to be a fine art photographer in the manner of his early inspiration.

Andre Breton once described Man Ray as a 'pre-surrealist', something which accurately describes the artist's natural affinity for the style. Even before the movement had coalesced, in the mid 1920s his work had surrealist undertones and he would continue to draw on the movement's ideas throughout his life. His work has ultimately been very important in popularising surrealism.

Though often shadowed by his lifelong friend and collaborator, Macel Duchamp, Man Ray played a major role in Dada and Surrealist movements in America as well as in Europe. His multiple attempts to promote avant-garde art movements in New York widened the horizons of the American art scene. His serious yet quirky imagery has influenced a broad audience through different iterations of his work in culture. Many of his important works were donated to museums around the world through a trust set up by his wife before her death in 1991. Most importantly, his process-oriented rt making and versatility have influenced a number of modern and contemporary artists, from Andy Warhol to Joseph Kosuth, who like Ray strove to continually blur the boundaries between artistic disciplines.

Jerry Uelsmann Experiment

In order to create the same effect as Jerry Ueslmann, I have taken two different photos and photoshopped them into a double exposure. To do this I have over sandwiched the image of the tree bend two duplicate layers on hands and then used the eraser tools on the top layer with varying opacity to reveal and blend together the two images. I chose to see keep the image within the hands in colour as I think with these two photos in particular that the colour allows you to view more detail in the photo than if it were in black and white it starts to loose detail and also it isn't as visible against the hands as I would have liked it to be.

This technique of editing is definitely something I am going to consider using in my final piece as it is a really effective way of viewing an image and also links in well with the truth, fantasy and fiction.

Contact Sheets

Artist Research - Jerry Uelsmann

Born in Detroit on June 11, 1934, Jerry Uelsmann received his B.F.A. degree at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1957 and his M.S. and M.F.A. at Indiana University in 1960. He began teaching photography at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1960 (“my first job offer”). He became a graduate research professor of art at the university in 1974, and is now retired from teaching. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Uelsmann received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1972. He is a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, a founding member of The Society of Photographic Education and a former trustee of the Friends of Photography. Uelsmann’s work has been exhibited in more than 100 individual shows in the United States and abroad over the past thirty years. His photographs are in the permanent collections of many museums worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliotheque National in Paris, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the National Gallery of Canada, the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto.

Kevin Corrado Experiment

My experiment was based on series of images Kevin Corrado has produced where a hand and forearm can be seen with paint covering the hand that matches the colour of the background/landscape. Compared to his images this piece is not entirely accurate and when seeing his images compared to mine you can see some differences within them. Firstly, my horizon line is not in the correct position and is situated too high up the canvas compared to his image and also I was zoomed too close into the landscape and I just focused on one area in the landscape instead of considering the surrounding areas. The colour of the paint isn't as much of a match as I first thought it was when viewing it in the shop and therefore doesn't create the effect that I was aiming for. 

If I was to create this emulation again I would make sure that I look in closer detail at the photographers image so that I can get every detail correct and make the emulation more like Kevin Corrado's piece.

Contact Sheets

Artist Research - Kevin Corrado

Another artist that has interested me and can be related to more towards fantasy and fiction is Kevin Corrado, he is a considerably famous surrealist photographer and his pieces have inspired me the most to pursue surrealism in photography for this unit.

This photograph by Kevin Corrado uses a very limited colour palette as the prominent colours are browns in various shades and some greys out in the distance and this is due to the lack of natural light being included into the photo as there is a dense collection of tree in the background and surrounding the character laying down. However the limited colour palette keeps to the conventions of surrealism and is giving the photo a eery feel to the photograph. Also the fact that there is a body being divided by the photo frame it adds to the surrealism factors of the photo and also make you think twice about what you are actually seeing within the frame.

This photograph again is using a very limited colour palette but this time the prominent colour is greens in different shades and there isn't much variation in other colours. The other colour that stands out to any viewer would be the grey t-shirt and is standing central of the photograph. Kevin Corrado has also included a aperture in this photo to give the character and the clock more importance by blurring and fading the foreground and background. The photo also makes you start to ask questions like, 'Why's he in the middle of the woods? and Why has he got a clock? and questions like this are quite common as surrealism makes you ask question because not everything is apparent to you at first.

This photograph is taken in black and white and is using again a very limited colour palette, black, whites and greys, and is following the conventions of surrealism of photography. Because it is using black and whites it doesn't use any focal colours so you aren't drawn to one certain part that has a different coloured aspect somewhere in the photograph. The focal point is around the person walking down the train tracks but is missing his whole upper body excluding his arms. Where his torso is meant to be you can see down the rest of the track and what you would be seeing if the body was still there. By following the conventions this is a perfect example of surrealism photography as it creates questions and makes you look twice and makes you think about what you're seeing.

Edward Weston Experiments

Pepper 1 - Original Image

Pepper 2 - Original Image

Here are the original images without it being edited in the style of Edward Weston. To create the shadows on this image I used lighting based a fair distance away as if it was too close the shadows would have been smaller than they are and also not as dark as I would have wanted. Also I wanted the lighting to create some different shapes when editing into black and white. Edward Weston's images of the peppers would have been extremely difficult to recreate as the peppers that are sold in supermarkets now are shaped perfectly with little or no imperfection which is completely opposite to the shapes of Weston's.

Pepper 1 - Edited

Pepper 2 - Edited Image

Here are my final images that I created after the editing process, this process I went through to get this final image was extremely simple but effective. The first thing I did was change the image to black and white so it was in the style of Weston and then changed the levels, hue and saturation until I felt happy that the image was starting to create shapes that wouldn't have been there in the first image I took. If I was going to try to replicate Weston's style I would try and use peppers that are a little more deformed and obscure so that I can get different shapes being created with the shadows.

Contact Sheets - Black And White

Contact Sheet - Colour

Artist Research - Edward Weston

Edward Weston's Background

Edward Henry Weston was born March 24, 1886, in Highland Park, Illinois.  He spent the majority of his childhood in Chicago where he attended Oakland Grammar School. He began photographing at the age of sixteen after receiving a Bull’s Eye #2 camera from his father. Weston’s first photographs captured the parks of Chicago and his aunt’s farm. In 1906, following the publication of his first photograph in Camera and Darkroom. 

After working briefly as a surveyor for San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, he began working as an itinerant photographer. He peddled his wares door to door photographing children, pets and funerals. Realizing the need for formal training, in 1908 Weston returned east and attended the Illinois College of Photography in Effingham, Illinois. He completed the 12-month course in six months and returned to California. In Los Angeles, he was employed as a retoucher at the George Steckel Portrait Studio.

Weston began experiencing symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in 1946 and in 1948 shot his last photograph of Point Lobos. In 1946 the Museum of Modern Art, New York featured a major retrospective of 300 prints of Weston’s work.

Edward Weston is an extremely well known photographer and he was the photographer that created the pepper photograph which I am going to talk abit about:

Pepper

Pepper No. 30 is one of the best-known photographs taken by Edward Weston. It depicts a solitary green pepper in rich black-and-white tones, with strong illumination from above.

In the late 1920s Weston began taking a series of close-up images of different objects that he called "still lives". For several years he experimented with a variety of images of shells, vegetables and fruits, and in 1927 he made his first photograph of a pepper. He received mixed feedback about that image, but two years later he started a new series that focused on peppers alone. He recorded twenty-six negatives of peppers taken during 1929, mostly taken against plain burlap or muslin backdrops.

A year later, during a four-day period from August 2–6, 1930, Weston took at least thirty more negatives of peppers. He first tried again with plain muslin or a piece of white cardboard as the backdrop, but for these images he thought the contrast between the backdrop and the pepper was too stark. On August 3 he found a large tin funnel, and, placing it on its side, he set a pepper just inside the large open end.