Research Evaluation

After the first lecture to help us start off with the initial ideas we got shown many different artists and the ones that caught my eye the most was Robert Polidori, Sophie Gerrard and Pieter Hugo. I wanted to research those three artists as they were all very different and I wanted to get a variety of different artists to start to write down my first ideas. Straight away I knew that I wanted to create something to do with portraiture and people working with waste so Pieter Hugo has probably inspired me the most from the beginning. Then I found a small article from the National Geographic called “The Young Waste Picker” by David Nguyen, it was about a young boy who picks waste for a living but also lets tourist take the picture of him for money. That interested me even more about the people living of other people’s waste and how they survive. That pushed my research more into Steve McCurry who takes very strong portraits. I wanted to look more into his images mostly to develop my technical ideas about my pictures, to try to use different lens and how to edit my images digitally to make them look extremely strong. ‘Afghan Girl’ is the most famous photograph by Steve McCurry which has been presented in National Geographic Magazine and that is when I decided to try to make a good enough final piece that would make it to the National Geographic Magazine and played around with different covers to compare my work to the official Magazine. But after looking at all my images I came to a conclusion that they was very similar and I needed a new idea to make them more constructed. I decided to look at some close up images and that is how I found an image by Tina Modotti ‘Hands Resting on a Tool’ which is a very strong image of hands as a portrait of a person working. After trying that out my idea moved towards surrealism and presenting people by the objects, I wanted to create portraits of people but focusing on the mechanical and toxic waste that I had. That pushed my further photoshoot towards Vivianne Sassen’s photography. Lassen works around surrealism and presenting portraits in a very bizarre way, throughout researching surrealism I found a young photographer who is only starting his career and isn’t very famous, his name is Bryan Durushia who also make surrealist photographs of people by replacing their heads with many different objects, sometimes he replaces them completely but sometimes he covers the heads up. Throughout that research I thought about an artist that I researched in my previous projects, her name is Ann Hamilton. Hamilton also plays around with objects replacing people’s body parts. I thought that this was a perfect research for what I wanted to do and that took my idea further with presenting the person as an object and that is what I did on my final photoshoot.