Introduction.
I have chosen the topic Disguise. I chose this topic because I don't know many photographers who use disguise in their work but I want to research and find out more about how it works and how I can use it in my own work. I want to understand how it works how to hide someone by still seeing them. I like the idea of only being able to see part of somebody maybe if you cover their face then you can see their bodies it makes me think about what they may look like.
First set of images.
David Szauder
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David Szauder is a hungarian media artist working in Berlin since 2008. He thinks theres a parallel between the way the human and digital memory works. The body of the models remains untouched but their faces become fragmented and glitched. Every image he takes has its own story explaining what happened to the memory of the person in the image. He said “Our brains store away images to retrieve them later, like files stored away on a hard drive. But when we go back and try to re-access those memories, we may find them to be corrupted in some way.” This can explain a lot of why his work is because it shows that he believes theres a link between the human memory and computers.
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David Szauder takes an everyday portrait of a person or family and distorts their faces, he does this because he believes that human brains are like hard drives for computers. All of his images are framed really well and composed perfectly so that he can edit all of the faces within the image. Unlike this image he hasn't edited the face of the woman at the bottom of the screen he chose to leave her face as normal, this may have been done because it would affect the body of the man stood behind her. He has some images in black and white and then others in colour.
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Second set of images.
Eva Stenram
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Eva Stenram likes to find negatives magazines and images from the internet as her source of information and working material. She has a series called Drape in these images body parts such as legs and arms are seen from underneath a curtain.Eva used photographs she found from the 1950's/60's she changed them to make them her own.
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Eva Stenram used everyday things like curtains and sheets to cover a person or parts of people. This made her images quite unusual and different from a lot of other artists. She uses black and white to replicate the idea she found inspiration from, her images are all framed quite well she gets exactly what she needs in shot and keeps the backgrounds very plain and simple to keep the focus on what the image is representing. As in these images you can't see the person it makes the images more memorable as you remember the odd pose their doing.
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Third set of images.
Damien Blottiere
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Damien Blottiere is French he is based in Paris he turns his own fashion pieces into cool pieces of art. He has worked with a lot of magazines such as V, dazed & confused and Vogue. He gets his influence from this subjects their skin, bones,muscles, face shapes and body parts. With his images he wants to create the idea of a surrealistic sculpture.
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Damien Blottiere does something sort of like David Szauder he also distorts peoples faces but also their bodies. He likes to use the persons own body to distort themselves, he will use their hair or face across their body to totally change the way an image looks. He also uses muscle and bone shapes to change the way an image looks he will take a part of someone's face then he will alter it in the shape of their face and place it over the top to change the way they look.
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Fourth set of images.
Fifth Set Of Images-Summer
Sixth Set Of Images
Viviane Sassen
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Viviane Sassen lived in Kenya for 3 years during her childhood she said '"To me, Africa is vivid colours and strong contrasts of light and dark," These are some of the images from Viviane Sassen's group of photographs called 'Flamboya' this is my favourite set of images by her. I like these a lot because I think they show disguise perfectly. She manages to make the photographs look effortless and disguises the people amazingly. Viviane sassen uses the prefect amount of light and obstructions to cover a part of someones body.
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Viviane Sassen took many sets of images whenever she visited Africa, but this set stuck out to me the most because in these images she was actually hiding people's body's and faces. She masked people's appearance by using light and shadows and she did it very well she covered people's faces successfully. She also framed all of her images well, all that is seen in the frame is what is necessary so the person and then the background. All of her backgrounds are fairly plain most have walls or the beach, this helps to keep the focus on what the image is showing.
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Seventh Set Of Images.
Eighth Set Of Images
Display Strategies
I like the idea of hanging my photographs like this because I think its a clear way to display them and its interesting. I want it too look quite colourful and different from a lot of other peoples.
Final Piece.
I feel like these images went really well they are very simple but represent the theme really well. I wanted a plain background to really bring out the colours of the t-shirts and what the people are doing within the images. I think the image of the girl stood next to the old post really contrasts with all the colours it stands out as an image. The other image that really stands out is the one of all the children looking at the smallest that again shows a contrast in age and the way that they are all digused just enough. Most of the images are very dull looking as there wasn't much light in the area where I took the images.
This is my first final piece I grouped these ones together because they go together quite well. The colours are the same the way the pink and white go together. I also put these together because you can see part of the floor in both images at first the girl is the only thing with any colour then you see a little bit of colour in the corner of both images. You can also see a lot of the corner in the images it looks like she's been put in the corner. I only wanted a single person in the photograph to draw more attention to her so that people could be curious and wonder about her I wanted it be simple but look quite dramatic and colourful and I did what I wanted with the images.
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Final evaluation
I really enjoyed doing this project. I found it interesting to find out about how i could disguise people in many ways. I also found out about a lot of interesting artist like Viviane Sassen and Eva Stenram who both use disguise in very different and creative ways. I also enjoyed using everyday things to cover people up. I found it quite difficult because after a while it became quite hard to find any inspiration because artists started to have the same kind of ideas. I got quite a bit of my inspiration at first from David Szauder I liked the way he disguised people I also found his reasons very interesting about how he thought about how peoples minds work. I also looked at Damein Blottiere who did soemthing very similar to David Szauder he used the persons own body and face to change the way they looked. I never experimented with the way these artists took and edited their images because for me it showed disguise but not in the way I imagined it. Then later on in the project I got really interested in Eva Stenram she had simple ideas but captured them in a way that instantly got you interested to find out what she was doing. My final piece was inspired by Eva Sternram her simplistic way of taking images I decided to take images in a similar style making them really simple but effective images. These images also represented how I imagined disguise as simple but exactly what I wanted images, these showed the whole project and what I did throughout most of it really well they were some pf the best images I had taken throughout the whole project and I thought they showed what I intended really well. I think that my use of the plain background really helped to focus on the bright colours within the image it helps certain people to stand out in different images like when the girl is wearing pink against the white background it helped the focus stay on her. The other colours within the images are really bright and sometimes its hard to focus on just one person however, there are also some images that don't have much colour at all or the colours are very dull like the image of the people both in white against the white background the only colour seems to be the floor and the colour isn't even that noticeable it quite dull.