Beyond the Frame Critical Evaluation
My project ‘Portraits’ developed from wanting to feel more comfortable using a studio and digital medium format cameras and an interest in macro photography. I wanted to experiment with still life photography, which is something I haven’t really explored before, and create extremely detailed images of fruit and vegetables. My project is all about imperfections that people in our western society are ashamed for having and I wanted to show that people shouldn’t be embarrassed about them as it is something out of our control and is found in other forms of nature.
The journey of what I should photograph was a struggle. I first started with fruit and veg that didn’t show true imperfections, maybe for humans for instance hair and spots, but not for the fruit themselves. I found out that there is an EU law on what fruit and beg can be sold in the UK, and discovered a ‘People’s Supermarket’ that sells the fruit and veg that don’t pass the law. Here I discovered true deformities in fruit and veg and related them to more serious imperfections and deformities for humans. For example, in my project there are scars, sprangel’s shoulder, elephantiasis, vitiligo and Piebaldism.
As I had never really done still life before, I wasn’t 100% sure on how to best display and light my studio. I first started with an ordinary table and a plain white backdrop which covered it. I used two soft boxes, one high on the right of the object and the other level with the object two its left. I wasn’t happy with the outcomes of this shoot as firstly the fruit and vegetables I used were disappointing in themselves as they weren’t unique, secondly the lighting appeared dull and didn’t give the images any shine which is what I was after. From this, I then decided to use a light table to brighten up my image a little more because it was more reflective of light than the paper. I changed the lighting around slightly, still using soft boxes. However, I was still creating shadows that I didn’t want, so in my last shoot I light the table up from underneath using a floor light, and still kept the two light boxes above to help even the light out. In the end, I was happy with how the images were coming out, however there were images from the other shoots where I really liked the vegetables in them, so I decided to edit them slightly more in Lightroom and Photoshop than the ones needed in the last shoot.
I experimented with different medium format cameras and found that I didn’t get on with the Hasselblad at all, so many things kept going wrong with the camera itself as well as the shoot that day. However, I mainly used the Phase One, which I can safely say I worked well with and will definitely be using that camera in my future projects.
Not many of the lectures or visiting artists influenced much of my work, however the lecture on a skeptical approach to selfhood and identity in the history of philosophy got me thinking about identity and how we see and compare ourselves within society. The exploitation and empathetic identification lecture got me thinking about how it’s best and appropriate to show and almost exploit, to some extent, something so close to people’s identities such as imperfections without objectifying humans and their bodies.
