Muk can't surf

For my home project, I decided to take photos of images that conveyed a sense of home to me and a sense of escapism rather than actually being home (because I hate where I come from, fight me Bexleyheath)

 

For my portraits, I decided I want to use natural lighting throughout the three images for a sense of creating a sequence and uniting what the viewer will see as three strangers together in a common theme. I treated the stranger, someone I knew, and I guess..myself…as the same, giving little to no instruction and letting them pose how they wanted. The combination of natural lighting and the subject feeling natural created a very organic process and I found this project to be the most interesting and fun out of all three.

me looking cute as heck

my flatmate joe looking manly as heck Stranger called Lucy who was super nice and we made friends over rockabilly and psychobilly

 

I am going to open this with that the photographs I took are not that great but I believe that the message beyond them outweighs it…I hope…

(please)

 

For my  still life project, I wanted to take photos that conveyed a sense of self destruction. The idea of “finding the objects” to me meant that you were finding a story, the context behind the photo was up to the viewer to decide whether you change the meaning or not the first thought that comes to your head when you see an image tends to be the one that you stick with throughout. So with this in mind, I once again went to our lord and saviour Pinterest and searched for images that conveyed a sense of self destruction and the power behind mental illness.

I also looked at the photographer Christian Sampson who took the subject of mental illness and conveyed how he felt that people who suffer from different mental illnesses perceived the world.

 

Here are the still images that I took of photographs that I found. One criticism that I have for the photographs is that I did not spend enough time looking into set design as well as the fact that lighting for them are considerably weaker than the rest of my work.

 

Donald Trump’s political campaign uses the phrase “Make America Great Again” to go alongside his delusional right wing fear mongering tactic of capitalising on paranoia of the less intelligent in order to gain support. The use of past tense in that phrase made me think back through America’s history, one that is mixed with achievements as well as that of failure and inhumane acts such as the development of the KKK, the slave trade as a whole and as well as the Vietnam War. Therefore, my aim in this subject of appropriation was to dwell on the failures rather than that of the achievements that Donald Trump tries to exploit. For this particular image I searched Pinterest for pictures of KKK members, the first one I finding being black and white therefore the phrase did not show up too well so I continued to search until I found this image above with the placement of fire covering the first few letters helped emphasis the destructive nature of his campaign as well as the fact that a member of the KKK is doing a Nazi salute helped convey what message I was trying to create through this satirical political campaign poster.

 

The original image was a vintage poster advertising ties with the sexist imagery of a woman serving her husband for pleasure telling the man to “show her it’s a man’s world”. Obviously sexist in nature it shows the popular consensus of the mistreatment and objectification of women, so I photoshopped out the ties but kept the tagline of a “man’s world” and put the porn company Brazzers logo to show another time of serving and objectification, showing how in modern day that the porn industry can be seen as manipulation of sexuality. Not only this but I later researched female photographers and found Sara Naomi Lewkowicz’s photography of domestic abuse, a powerful image with no double meanings but showing an unadulterated vehement perspective of abuse but as well as this, femininity. In her image, it displays an vulnerability in the situation as well as feeling powerless in a very clear way however with my piece I made it more subtle by not showing something of a sexual nature but rather conveying the same sense of vulnerability and sexual dominance in social standards rather than that of violence.

This is a picture I found on the internet that had “double your fun with jesus” and just thought it’d be funny if it said the word Sin instead since it’s Jesus and a kid skateboarding

 

 

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