Power To the Subject

"These portraits of patients in a Cuban psychiatric hospital the notion of power becomes even more central due to the vulnerability (or perceived vulnerability) of the subjects. This is addressed by handing over the majority of the power to the subject, who takes their own portrait with the help of a shutter release cable. Photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s controls has been limited to framing (full body)  background (plain) and viewpoint of camera (eye level), all choices made for neutrality. The rest comes down to the subject’s personality/mood, the two most magical examples for me are Mario (top) who decided to turn his back on the camera and Julio (bottom) who made two portraits: One for his heart and one for his head."

Banal/beautiful?

Faruk Akbas is a Turkish freelance photographer specialised in nature and lifestyle.

I'm not normally interested in nature photography but there's something about this guy -should be the use of colours- that it really attracts my attention and somehow looks beautiful as ever. He concentrates of lifestyle, which is also documentary. When I look at the first two pictures, I can tell right away that they were taken in Turkey and I think that's what I'm meant to be getting from it so it's working to it's purpose. I find the last photo of the forest in Autumn absolutely fascinating -I could stare at it the whole day. I think I like how this guy can bring out the beautiful side out of something that really is usual and not very exciting or even banal in some cases.

Snow. March. Istanbul.

I had to go back to Istanbul for something about my passport on March the 3rd. And. It was snowing.
And not like a little bit, properly snowing. So, being stuck at home, I took my film camera out and took some photos.

Digital Production

One of our units in university is called Digital Production, which is a Photoshop unit. For this unit we had a selection of options that we could choose to go with and I chose to do Option 2=Advertising, Editorial or Fashion: Cosmetics.

Apart from the photographs, this time, we had to also submit a (minimum) 10seconds video, somehow related to the photographs and the shoot.

I decided to re-create Dove's proage advertisements. And my video was also gonna be about that. After doing some research about it, this is what I created for the video brief. It was my first time doing video and I have put a lot of effort in it. There were things that I would change if I had more time, such as it being a bit too depressing, but I am happy with this as well.

Trip to Nottingham

I was on the train to Nottingham about 2 years ago. This aggressive mum with two kids one aged 4 and other aged 6 i'm guessing. She must be having a really bad day cause all she did was to shout at her kids the whole journey, whatever they did. I was sat at the seat behind them and I took out my camera to document the looks on these kids faces which I found quite interesting. As I was trying to do this very subtlety, the older kid saw me and funnily enough he started posing -he was loving it!

Stables

Last summer I was employed at this horse-riding stables in Istanbul/Turkey; to take photographs of the place and horses in there. It was my first ever job and it was different because my photographs -for the first time- had to actually sell the place.
Before I started taking the photos the owner sat me down and told me how she wants the photographs to be. The photos I took were gonna go onto their website they were building at the time (I believe it is still under-construction). I was really happy because as soon as I showed her the first image I took she said "That's exactly what I want!". So after that, it was a lot more relaxed and I could actually enjoy doing what I was doing. Yet, I never knew how hard it is to capture animals. They wanted me to capture about 13 horses in a particular pose which would, apparently, show off their 'great' character the most and it was definitely the most challenging thing about this project.
I, most certainly, took some images for my personal use which weren't particularly selling the place but are still nice shots. Here are some of them:

LOVE

I took this photograph in the Summer of 2009. It was my first ever experience with light graffiti. I was on a shoot but the whole idea of this light graffiti wasn't planned. It just happened to be then that I tried it because I only had recently explored it. I created the graffiti with the built in flash on my Canon, using slow shutter speed. I formed the letters L, O, V, E on a curvy street with my model standing in frame with a blue dress that attracts your eye. Then I put together these four images.
I have later on in time as I got better in photography, realised some faults in this image, like the model not being in line in all the photos but nothing major or not-correctable.

Maggie by Lisa Barnard

When I first saw this image in the London Art Fair 2011, I, to be honest, didn't realise it was Margaret Thatcher. I thought it could be the photographer's grandmother or something like that.
I came home, found the image online, saved it on my laptop to put it on my blog later on. Only realised today, when I did some research about it to make sure I don't give false information in my post.
Even though I didn't know practically anything about this image when I first saw it, I still liked it a lot because -apart from it looking aesthetically beautiful- it looks like it's loaded with meaning.
Apparently, this image is a part of Lisa Barnard's ongoing documentation of the former Conservative Central Office.

" Like an archaeologist excavating the remains of Thatcherism, Barnard has examined the building – unoccupied since the Tories left in 2004 – twice each month since August 2009. Some of her images picture the building’s strange, decrepit corporate blue spaces, stained carpets and cracked plasterboard; others its surreal wasteland of diplomatic gifts, dishevelled election posters, rosettes and un-blown-up balloons. But it is the portraits of Thatcher, unearthed in an old cupboard, which bring together these works and define the project. Re-photographing the official images, and cropping out the various international dignitaries with whom Thatcher had originally posed, Barnard exposes the photographs’ corrupted state -– an ode to the impermanence and instability of colour photosensitive materials. Like Thatcher’s vision of politics, the portraits’ aged and slightly bleached surfaces are diluted and distorted in their present form. Deteriorating at different rates, the yellow, magenta and cyan dyes have reacted to time, humidity and damp, resembling the psychedelic chemical colour swirls of oil slicks. "

Sometimes, home is just a feeling

The following photographs were taken by Annie Leibovitz for Louis Vuitton's "Journeys" Ad Campaign. French Actress Catherine Deneuve's image at a train station was the first one I saw out of the series. The thing that attracted my attention was the tag-line: "sometimes, home is just a feeling". And that's because I believe that it's a sentence that every individual can relate to as much as I did.
Apart from the lighting and the composition, I also really enjoy how they tell stories, the use of tag-lines and how these tag-lines give the photos an intention. It's not always easy to find the perfect captions for images. For example: the third photo features Mikhail Gorbachev, a Russian politician, looking disturbed in the back of a cab in Germany. He is looking out the window with the Berlin Wall in the background and a LV bag next to him on the seat. Here, the tagline is just perfectly relevant and that's what I really like about the series.

Guess Campaign 1990

Photograph below was taken by Ellen von Unwerth in 1990 for a Guess Campaign. Despite the fact that this image was captured in a photo shoot, it still looks natural - and that's because they didn't go for a typical model pose and also because they chose to shoot it on location, so there's nothing unreal about the photograph. I'm not sure what exactly, but there is something about this photograph that I absolutely love. The exposure and contrast are spot on, framing is great and I doubt I even need to mention how beautiful the subject looks. Even though the model, Claudia Schiffer, is wearing night wear, the relatively strong ambient light makes us suspect that. Her appearance makes you think that she's waiting for someone. 

Angle it right!

These following photos were forwarded to my email by a friend. They aren't good quality photos yet I find them brilliant! Great thinking.

The Most Beautiful Suicide, 01/May/1947

Saw this image whilst surfing on web. I don't think words are enough to describe the feeling it gives. When you first look at the photograph, you don't think it's real, almost like it's a set up scene and she isn't actually dead. And I guess that is the part that I become speechless,  that fact that she looks so much in peace.
The interesting and eerie story behind the image has also been beautifully reflected using an important element in photography: form.

Some images do not include an interesting content but an interesting (and simply beautiful looking) form, like Edward Weston's Pepper. But with the image The Most Beautiful Suicide we can see that when the use of form and content are combined, the outcome will most probably be impressive.

"On May Day, just after leaving her fiancé, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale wrote a note. 'He is much better off without me ... I wouldn't make a good wife for anybody,' ... Then she crossed it out. She went to the observation platform of the Empire State Building. Through the mist she gazed at the street, 86 floors below. Then she jumped. In her desperate determination she leaped clear of the setbacks and hit a United Nations limousine parked at the curb. Across the street photography student Robert Wiles heard an explosive crash. Just four minutes after Evelyn McHale's death Wiles got this picture of death's violence and its composure."

Another rainy day in England

The other day, I was working on my project that had a deadline to the following day. It was just before midnight that -not surprisingly- it started to rain. The rain that was hitting my window seemed so inspiring that i had to stop working on my project and take my camera out.

Surely, taking a picture of rain marks on a window seemed dull, there had to be something, or someone in the picture. Since I was alone in my room, my only option was to create a self-portait. So I did.

Placed the camera on top of two Nutella jars, pointed at the window and made sure that my reflection was in the picture. Probably took about 150 images because it was hard to go back and look at the images, considering that the camera was placed on a very unbalanced surface. Yet, I managed to capture a self-portrait, that I was very pleased with.

One other thing that caught my attention was my pin-boards reflection on the window. When combined with the florescent lamp, the colours and the outline of the posts on the pin-board created and image that is hard to figure out at first glance.

The humorous, quirky and observational moment

Today, Gary Salter came to the Arts University as a guest speaker. Unlucky enough, I was poorly so I could not attend.
It's quite upsetting that I have missed the chance to meet him considering that there is not a single image yet that I don't like of his.

Most of the time, you can tell if an image is taken by Gary Salter; he has a style of his own and i like that about his work -and also his sense of humour which reflects through his work. From my point of view, he is top 3 at what he does and he definitely is at where I would desire to be in the future.

I am going to try and contact him for my work placement this year, and hopefully, i'll get to learn from his experiences.

                                       

Lomography try-out

About two months ago, I found a used black and white 35mm film in my room and I had no idea what was it of. In my free time, I went to the dark room at university, took the film out of the can and developed it. Turns out it was a random film from last summer when I was trying out my new Lomography camera. Even though they were snapshots and they weren't the best quality, I still liked two of them. So I edited those two a little by altering the contrast (which added grain but I kind of liked that) and colour and here they are.