Staged Photography

Staged Photography is a celebration of images that were made consciously. This blog is about photographic art that was created on purpose, not simple snap-shots that were stumbled upon. Photographic artists make specific choices when staging their images. Beyond the unique eye that captures a given situation, these artists create the events, the environments or the emotion. This art form lives beyond the typical genres of photography. This site is NOT about landscape images, the clever shot found within the journalistic disciplines of street & people photography, nor is it about abstract imagery, although each genre certainly has its masters. This blog celebrates the image makers. The staged and constructed image is so much more compelling than a serendipitous one. There are many shooters who have a good eye. They can take a mundane moment and capture it in a powerful way… But an image that was created, that had its elements consciously placed and its composition arranged… That’s painting with light.

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David LaChapelle's iconic celebrity portraits have colored our zeitgeist. Check out his retrospective at Fotografiska New York starting 9 Sep 2022.

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Recreated Tang-dynasty outfits based on cave paintings / murals from mostly the Mogao Caves

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This Side of Paradise: Miles Aldridge

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Having studied music, design, and dance, Bettina Gorn has developed a unique language of expression that explores movement to capture transformation and externalize an internal reality. There’s something about her work that is reminiscent of the way Francis Bacon expresses an inner emotionality and psychological state.

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Pull back the curtain, Ole Marius Joergensen

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Body language, Sofia Masini

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Mark Hogancamp was the victim of a brutal hate crime in 2000. Attacked by five men outside a bar in Kingston, NY, for his love of cross-dressing, he was left for dead, spent nine days in a coma and almost two months in the hospital with irreversible brain damage and partial amnesia.

Unable to afford therapy, he created Marwencol in the safety of his own garden during his rehabilitation for the adventures of his alter ego, Captain Hogie, an American aviator. It is loosely a miniature fictional Belgian town (1:6 scale) set in World War II, named after a combination of his name, bartender Wendy and neighbor Colleen's. He meticulously dresses, stages, and lights the hundreds of scenarios to be photographed himself, working through the rage and fear of the brutality of men, in a safe haven populated with strong women.

The work captured the eye of photographer David Naugle, was published in Esopus, exhibited by White Columns (2006), inspired Jeff Malmberg to make a documentary film called Marwencol (2010), and Robert Zemeckis to make a drama called Welcome to Marwen (2018).

The video was from the exhibit at the American Folk Art Museum in New York in 2021.

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19th Century Paintings With South Indian Actors

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Plastic Renaissance, Suzanne Jongmans

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Sandy Skoglund (American, b. 1946, Quincy, MA, USA, based Jersey City, NJ, USA) - 1: Radioactive Cats, 1980  2: Cats in Paris, 1993, Photography

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Packaged goods, Polly Penrose

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Forest God part 1 by Oleg Vdovenko

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Recreated Tang-dynasty outfits based on cave paintings / murals from mostly the Mogao Caves

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Alice Laloy

Pinocchio(s)

Excerpted from the Artist Statement:

Having been given the opportunity to feature on the front cover of a specialised puppetry arts magazine, I decided to explore the tale of Pinocchio. More precisely, I was especially interested by the moment in which the metamorphosis between the puppet and the human child takes place. I chose to play a little with the quest for realism by using some basic make-up techniques to transform my child model into a puppet.

Pinocchio 0.0 was the starting point of a visual research project involving several series of photos of children portrayed in puppet-like, inanimate poses. The first series were produced in France. In the aim of reaching closer to portraying the disarticulated bodies of puppets, the following photo series was shot in Mongolia, in partnership with the Institut Français and the contortion schools of Oulan Bator.

Staged is fascinated by the visceral reaction these striking images elicit.

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Alex Majoli

Scene

This is not a typical staged photography post because it was not typically staged, but is an interesting investigation of Shakespeare’s famous premise that “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.” From his experience with wedding photography as a teenager through his work as a photojournalist lensing political and social crises around the world, Magnum photographer Alex Majoli always got the sense that he was photographing theater, and that each person plays their roles in the situations they find themselves in. In this series, he sought to investigate “What will happen if I create a space, a lit stage on which [people] can perform their own lives?”

Majoli traveled to Egypt, Congo, China, Brazil, Russia, Europe starting in 2010  to capture all kinds of situations – from the funeral of a 13-year-old girl to the protest in Tahrir Square or a local market – and consistently saw the same thing unfold: people pretty quickly shed their self-awareness and begin to “act themselves – except that they play themselves better, refine their life’s ‘performance’, somehow.” He and his team might take over an hour to frame the scene, stage the camera and powerful flashes to dramatically cast the immediate characters in a Caravaggesque light while plunging the surroundings into a shadowy backdrop. This gives the appearance of a darkly lit stage and lends the tableaux a certain melodrama and theatricality. He gave no direction but just let life play out before the camera in this study of the representation of drama and the drama of representation.

David Campany, co-curator of the exhibition on now at Le Bal, writes in the introduction to the book: “Majoli’s approach… constitutes a profound reflection upon the conditions of theatricality that are implicit in both photography and a world […] that is always potentially photographable.”

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Rich Allela and Dapel Kureng

African Queens

Photographers Rich Allela (from Kenya) and Dapel Kureng (from Nigeria) have created a photo series to celebrate Kenyan heroine Mnyazi wa Menza, a.k.a. Mekatilili, or Mother of Katilili. The only girl of 5 children born to poor parents in Giriama on the Kenyan coast, Mekatilili opposed British colonial administration and policies for their erosion of traditional Giriama culture and religion. As a young widow, she teamed up with a traditional medicine man, Wanje wa Mwadori Kola, and gained a large following through performing a funeral dance, the kifudu, from town to town. They organized a large meeting at Kaya Fungo, a sacred dwelling place, where they extracted mukushekushe and fisi oaths among the women and men, respectively, to never cooperate with the British. Thereupon, the British seized their land and razed their homes, which led to the Giriama Uprising of 1913.

Although she was arrested on 17 October 1913 and exiled to Mumias, (it is said) she escaped from prison and walked over 1,000 kilometers to return to Giriama, where she instigated the uprising of 25 October 1914. She was recaptured, but again made it back to Giriama after 5 years, where she continued to oppose British control up until her death in 1924.

She is an inspiring figure and Staged commends the series for portraying and honoring this fearless female warrior, despite possible criticism that could be raised about artistic direction or historical accuracy in details of clothing or landscape.

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Kirsty Mitchell

Wonderland

For the first time ever, the complete suite of 74 images produced for the Wonderland book is on display in a sumptuous, multimedia exhibit at Fotografiska in Stockholm. Kirsty started working on the project after the painful loss of her mother to brain cancer, escaping into the woods around her house and childhood memories of her mother reading fairy tales aloud and that magical world they shared.

Her training with Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan is evident in the richly imaginative and meticulously constructed costumes, headdresses and jewelry she made by hand, not to mention the props and set elements. Some images took up to 5 months to produce; with others, she waited a whole year for the window of opportunity when the appropriate flowers or foliage were in season.

Staged recommends reading this review, more about her heartwarming story and creative journey on her blog, and checking out the exhibit when in Stockholm.