Harvey Milk

"Politics is theatre; it's not about winning, it's about making a statement."

An extract from the film Milk. Love love love this quote.

Snapshot

My beautiful mother when she was my age. There's something that I have always really loved about this photograph.

Continuing from my last post...

Francesca Woodman completely inspired me for the remainder of my project. I absolutely adore her work, I always have. I love the ambiguity and mystery behind it.

Photograph by Francesca Woodman

Although for our project it was specified that we were only to use the studio space for shoots, I wanted the setting to be a bit more than simply a black or white background, so I decided to use the space a bit more creatively, incorporating the walls, doors, flooring and so on, yet keeping to the same subject and using the same techniques.

Thank you Jess for crawling, climbing, jumping and any other crazy things that I asked you to do. Couldn't love you more for it. xxx

Truth and lies

"The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture."

Susan Sontag

The above photos are from the beginning stages of my first photography project at Goldsmiths. I chose to look at truth and lies within photography, experimenting with the idea that a photograph does not represent reality truthfully due to the use of techniques of manipulation.

From a different angle of truth and lies, I looked at the fact that when you cannot see a persons facial expression, you cannot read whether they are being truthful or not.

I also looked at basic symbolism of truth and lies, for example the fact that the colour white represents purity, innocence and thus truthfulness, with the representation of black being the antithesis; mystery, insincerity and therefore 'lies'.

Combining these points of view, I decided to use a long exposure in order to blur the subjects facial expressions, omitting the possibility of reading the person, and using a manipulation technique to demonstrate how a photograph is not truthful to reality.

I'll put up some photos from the later shoots in another post at some point. I feel that they're kind of separate from these.

Sunshine

“In the cinema the camera can capture a moment, but that moment has already passed. What the cinema does is draw a shadow of that moment. We are no longer sure that the moment ever existed outside the film. Or is the film proof that the moment existed?"

An extract from the film “Lisbon Story"

The quality of this film is awful, it really didn't take well to being compressed! If I can find a way to upload a better quality version, I will.