Evaluation

Evaluation

For my final major project, I worked with the theme appearance. Within this, I wanted to look at a wide range of topics, such as discrimination and beauty. I thought giving myself a broad subject would allow me to produce a lot of work, which would all be really different from each other.

At the start of the project, I struggled finding a subject to start photographing, which would be a good point to go from. I decided to work a lot with skin, taking digital macro photographs of skin. This led me to photograph bodies and portraits, focusing mostly on people for my project. Photographing these subjects was something I really enjoyed, as it allowed me to photograph a lot in the studio, and work really close up with people, almost removing their identity in some of the images. The majority of these photographs are black and white, because it makes the models look softer, and it really compliments the skin when using soft lighting.

My final set of photographs were really bold colour portraits. I originally wanted to make magazine covers, but using real women and minimal photoshop to avoid falling in to the stereotype of false beauty, something I had wrote about in my work. After creating some covers and articles, I decided to abandon the idea of using text with my work, as myself and tutors thought it held back my work. In the end, I shot the work I had originally intended to do, but without the writing. It was something really different to do, because it was a massive contrast between my black and white work which I had used previously.

All of my photographs were taken digitally, on a Canon 1100D DSLR camera, most of which were also taken with a 50mm 1.8f lens, which allowed me to have a shallow depth of field within the frame, drawing attention to specific subjects. A lot of my work was created in the studio, using Bowens lights with soft boxes attached to make the models look bright, with smooth skin, which is a recurring theme within the photographs.

I have enjoyed this project, as I’ve been able to focus mainly on photographing people. In future projects, it is very possible I will revisit my theme of appearance, because photographing these subjects and models has allowed me to develop and mature as an artist.  

Exhibition

For weeks, we have been setting up our exhibition, transforming our classroom into a gallery to exhibit all the students work. This has consisted of me sanding boxes, painting, mounting, framing and hanging my work ready for the night on the 18th of June.

For my exhibition, I had decided against using my final colour portraits, and went for some of my stronger work instead. These were the photographs selected.

Photographs selected, mounted and framed, which I had done independently. 

Photographs hung for the first time. I noticed that when the landscape photographs were hung, they came away from the wall because the hangers were too low down, so I unscrewed them and rescrewed them higher up to stop the tilting. As well as this, the photographs started to come away from the mounting board, which after feedback from tutors I decided to change, to avoid putting myself in a worse position for my final grades.

Although the photographs needed remounting, I arranged the frames properly so that I could easily finish my pieces after mounting.

After moving the hangers, the photographs sat nicely on the wall.

During a group crit, I got some fantastic feedback from both tutors and students. A main talking point was the order that my work was in (as seen above). Having the nude woman as my centerpiece lead to a big discussion, as it was feared that it sexualised my work due to the 'male gaze', but on moving the photographs to have the bodies together, I felt it sexualised it far further than before, having two nude women together. I also felt that it split my work apart, seeming like two separate sets, and I didn't like having a landscape and portrait next to each other. We tried rearranging the photographs a few times, but myself and my peers preferred the original arrangement, which I returned my work to.

Also, I remounting the photograph of the man on the far left after reprinting it to make the photograph smoother in the frame. I also put all the photographs against the glass instead of slightly back, which stopped the problem of the prints coming away from the mounting card, the final mounts can be seen below. (This is not the final order, this is experimenting by moving the prints)