Brief 3
Portraiture is my favourite type of photography and the most enjoyable of all. Portraiture is the type of photography that explores emotions and captures the moment in people, such as wedding photography to your first school photo. It’s all portraiture. During my study of portraiture I have really fell in love with capturing raw and real emotions within it. Portraiture is really about capturing the right moment within a split of a second.
One of my influencers in my portraiture pieces is Krijn van Noordwijk, especially for my stranger portrait. This photographer really captures the emotion and feelings of people. I feel this photographer really captures the raw essence, and the people photographed usually have something incredibly different or alternative looking about them.
Another influence of mine is Florence Autelin. I love the way she gets close up in people’s faces to capture the emotions in full. She takes photos of people in the pinnacle of their emotion, whether they are in the pinnacle of happiness or just after they have had a drag on their last cigarette, she always captures the raw and none put on emotion. This is different to Krijn van Noordwijk in the way that a lot of the photos she takes are obviously posed on or are expressionless. I feel Florence Autelin’s work is much more genuine and about bringing true emotions out about people.
The last inspiration for me is that of Kizzie Murray and her photos of people in London. She photographs people that have been or are currently addicted to a substance, or people that cannot afford housing. She photographs people with a dark background in dark and gritty colouring that looks under exposed. Exposing only the subjects features such as their eyes, and the clothes that they are wearing. This photography is the main reason why I chose to do my self portrait the way I did and was the biggest influence of it.
So how did I take my photos?
I took all of my portraits with a 50mm lens as it creates lovely bokeh background inside the pictures of the portraits that I was taking. Therefore drawing the viewers main attention to the actual subject of the image rather than the background and what is going on around it.
Friend
For the image of my friend. I have framed the image very close to her face, much like the way that Kizzie Murray does with her photographs. I have chosen to do it in this way for the main reason that I set out to capture the pose of annoyance. I did this by making my subject walk from one location to another and simply every minute or so stopping and asking her for a photo. Photo by photo you can see the build up of impatience and annoyance as I am shooting these photos. The photo I have chosen to use is the last one we took before we got to the final location. This is at the pinnacle of her impatienceness and annoyance with me.
Self
The self image was very experimental piece. I sat myself in my cupboard for a very long while with nothing but a flashing light infront of my face and the sound of crying babies and sounds of knives stabbing flesh on repeat. I wanted to capture the essence of violence and the brink of psychopathic thoughts. I set the camera up and aimed it at me, sitting in the cupboard for around 70 minutes and as soon as I pictured the thoughts and linked them in my head as a scene with the ever repeating sounds playing in the background I pressed the shutter release remote and captured my face at the time. Luckily I got the picture first time. The second photo I took was dead on, using the same technique as releasing the shutter at the brink of trying to control thoughts. I decided to go with the first photo I took as it is more clean and full of emotion.
Stranger
The photo of my stranger is very much inspired by Krijn van Noordwijk’s piece I love the way its photographed as the subjects of my photo, and his photo look similar, the only distance is that the subject in my photograph is much focused on something else rather than the camera itself. Making for a more voyeuristic looking portrait.
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