Sunday, May 07, 2006

Art

I've had a few people ask me lately about Art. Not in a general "what do you think of the state of the art world today?" way. Although I was interested to see Sebastion Smee proclaiming the death of Photography in the Australian last weekend. (When is someone not announcing photography's impending demise?) The idea is that photography is so much ingrained in popular culture that it's fading out of Artistic (with a capital A) culture. With such an overload of images, apparently we can no longer appreciate the artistic value of photographs, and photographers as artists have either fallen into banality or the need to shock or use tricks, which just doesn't work anymore anyway. Apparently "Photography has finally become just another way of making images". Well, yes. Wasn't is always, along with painting, printmaking, drawing, etc? They're all 'just ways of making images'. That's. Not. The. Point! Then this week was the death of Abstract. Oh, bollocks. Anyway. Art. Generally the question runs along the lines of when are YOU going to do some art? Well, I have been, a bit. Here are a few images are from a portrait project I've been working on. I place the subject in the same position in the frame, against different backgrounds; Either different angles in the same surrounding, or in different scene altogether. While it would be easier to photograph backgrounds separately, I want to get the person to be connected of each of backgrounds in the image. This ties them into their environments, and also allows ghosting/multiple poses of their own person. I think this especially works in the shot of Mari. I do keep the faces sharp though. I'm exploring the idea of the environmental portrait, and using multiple, merging backgrounds in hopefully a physical and psychological way. These are three of my favourites so far, and I'm on the look out for more subjects. So look out.

(Edited: I've just replaced the portrait of Sarah. The previous one was a draft.)

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