Be part of the revolution, start loving your body

At Uni, we were recently given a brief of creating an advertising campaign for a cosmetics company, I chose The Body Shop. My initial idea for this project was to create an advertising campaign based around the tag line “start a revolution, start loving your body” and influenced by revolutionary art work. I later changed the tag line to “be part of the revolution, start loving your body” because the phrasing of it makes the audience feel more involved, like they are part of something powerful and important.

 A painting that I wanted to take inspiration from was Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading The People. The painting was based on a moment when the people of France has succeeded in overthrowing the king, all different types of people, upper class, peasants, men, women all just coming together for one cause. I want my image to be based on this, all different types of women coming together for one reason, to create a new ideology. I originally wanted to have several women climbing over diet books, fashion magazines etc, brandishing a flag in the air. The concept being that they are rising above all the items which suggest that the women are not perfect the way that they are and are starting their own revolution in which women are comfortable in their own skin. However as I started planning and shooting the image, I dropped the idea of the books and magazines and just stuck with the women and the flag, I think it’s a strong enough image in itself without the extra props. I wanted to recreate the dull, muted colours that are used in the painting, so I did test shots using polarised glass over the lens and this did the job. When I went to shoot I used this glass and experimented with different white balance settings to change the colours. When I had my tutorial I was told I needed to reshoot because the background was “distracting”. However when I went to reshoot I couldn’t get hold of the polarised glass and so could not achieve the effect that I wanted in camera. I tried my best to achieve it in Photoshop, I don’t think it looks very good though and I think that this is a weakness of it. Although I quite liked the challenge of trying to figure out how to achieve it digitally, the end result is not how I wanted. I think that a strength would also be the stand of the model’s, particularly the one at the front, her legs are bent, wide apart and looking strong like she is leading the way. The others are lower than her and looking up, hands on each other’s shoulders like they are uniting together and following the character in front. This really puts across the message that I wanted it to. However a weakness would be the expressions of the models, they could do with being more convincing.

Return to Reason

One film that I find strangely enchanting is Man Ray's experimental film "La Retour a la Raison" (Return to Reason). Film was still relatively new at the time that it was made and Man Ray would have created it for his own learning and enjoyment, to experiment with how different materials could be shown and transcribe into moving image. I really like Man Ray's photographs and this film follows in his surreal style. The first time I saw it I didn't think much of it, but the more I watch it, the more mesmerising I find it.

Live feed of Nick Knight's shoot

Today I am watching the live feed of Nick Knight's photo shoot for V magazine, capturing a Spring/Summer collection of couture dresses on model Ming Xi. There is a lot of movement being captured, the model is dancing slowly and moving around while Knight directs her and captures his images. It's interesting to see a professional at work and how they direct and communicate with their model and the others in the studio. As a student about to do work placement, I can't help but watch the assistant standing in the corner looking awkward, desperate to create a good impression and rushing to fulfill the photographers needs whenever he wishes.

"Underlining the Asian inspiration of the latest haute couture collections, Nick Knight shoots new model Ming Xi in a selection of Paris' finest couture creations for Spring/Summer 2011, including Jean Paul Gaultier, Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci, and John Galliano for Christian Dior."


Watch it here at:
http://showstudio.com/project/ming_xi_couture_2011

Beauty Hurts?

Now that my first year at Uni is drawing to a close, I have a bit more free time to engage in some leisure activities. I really used to enjoy reading, I just haven't really had much time to do any in the last year, except for informative books as part of research work. The last week or so I have got back to reading "Pin Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality and Popular Culture" (Buszek, 2006). It is a really interesting read for anybody interested in this topic, and one part of the book which grabbed my attention was former porn star Annie Sprinkle's Anatomy of A 1980’s Pin Up. It reminded me of a piece of work by the feminist activist Andrea Dworkins who argued against highly sexualised imagery of women and claimed that women’s bodies where exploited by the way they are represented in porn. In her image Beauty Hurts Dworkin’s deconstructs the sexualised female body in terms of what they do to “get ready” in the mornings. She breaks down the body into different parts and states everything a woman must do to make it attractive, presumably for the satisfaction of men. Similarly,  Sprinkle's piece of work used this same layout and idea. In Anatomy of A 1980’s Pin Up she presents the viewer with a photo of herself and then has added text to point out all the manipulations that are carried out on the body of a woman, it almost looks like a photographic version of Dworkin’s diagram. However she has put a different spin on it, whereas Beauty Hurts looks like it could be straight out a text-book, Sprinkle has made hers cartoony, light-hearted and comical. Notes added to the image such as “corset hides a very big belly”  are to remind us that the whole “look” of the porn star is faked, an illusion to give the impression of the “perfect body”. These notes remind us that it is not real, it’s all trickery, smoke and lights. Unlike the connotations of pain and humiliation in Dworkin’s image, Sprinkle’s pin-up image suggests that women can take control of, deconstruct and find pleasure in the representation of their bodies and sexuality. She has created other performance works that provoke debate and show from her personal experience how much the body is manipulated for the purpose of fantasy within the sex industry. She doesn’t pass judgement or say that it’s bad, she just raises awareness that it is fantasy and not real. 

Beauty Hurts

Anatomy of a 1980's Pin Up

The Virgin Suicides

I am really inspired by the movies of Sofia Copploa, the mise en scene is always spot on. Her movies nearly always have the theme of loneliness and isolation, the two charcters in Lost in Translation, the teenage girls in The Virgin Suicides, the title character in Marie Antoinette, Coppola has developed her own distinct style of putting this across. There’s something about the whole aesthetics of her films, the delicate lighting, the faded colour palette, the feminine “look” of them that I find really appealing.

I re-watched the Virign Suicdes today and was reminded just how inspiring I find the imagery in it. Coppola has obviously paid very close attention in the story boarding of the film as every shot is perfectly framed to tell each part of the story.  I want to do a photo shoot which pays homage to this film. I’m going to find models and try and shoot this in the next couple of weeks, watch this space for the results! Here are stills from the movie which I will be using for inspiration….

The Most Beautiful Suicide

Whilst looking into the Empire State Building, I came across a photograph by photography student Robert Wiles, which has been described as an image of "the most beautiful suicide". On 1^st May 1947, a 23 year old woman left her fiancée and chose to commit suicide by throwing herself off of the Empire State Building. She left a note with her things left on the observatory deck "he is much better off without me ... I wouldn't make a good wife for anybody,' ... Then she crossed it out before jumping.  In her determination to end her life she leaped clear of the set backs and landed on a United Nations Limousine parked at the curb. Wiles was on the street that it happened on and got this photo minutes after her death. I find the photo strangely memorising. It’s odd to think that something so horrific and sad as ending ones life in such a violent way could somehow result in something that looks so peaceful, so calming, almost beautiful….

Empire State Of Mind

The photographs of Lewis Hine never fail to amaze me no matter how many times I see them. Hine would use his camera as a tool for social reform and in particular focus on mans contribution to industry. He was commissioned by the National Child Labour Committee to document child labour in industry in America and the resulting photographs were instrumental in the changing of child labour laws. I think it amazing that photographs can not only have this amount of influence and power to change a law that has been in place for so many years but to change the way people think about the issues as well.

In the 1930s Hine was commissioned to document the construction of the Empire State Building, these pictures fascinate me. The workers would work up there with no harnesses, no safety precautions whatsoever, Hine endured the same dangerous conditions to get the best vantage points of the workers. The majority of the workers were immigrants from Europe and would undoubtedly be getting paid peanuts considering the work that they were doing. The construction started in March 1930 and ended May 1931, and the statistic that I’ve found for the death count of construction workers is five, which, if it’s true, I find quite surprisingly low. Having been up the Empire State Building myself, I find it quite incredible that these workers could have worked at such heights. I don’t suffer from any fear of heights, at least not anything that’s caused any set backs for me, but I remember standing on the 86^th floor looking over the side and suddenly feeling a strange sense of vertigo, my knees were shaking and I had a sick feeling in my stomach. I take my hat off to the brave workers who risked their lives.

I remember seeing this photograph years ago, probably as a kid, and not thinking a lot of it. It is an image constantly reproduced and shown and some people have even bought it on canvas from high street shops and hung it on their wall. It had no effect for me because I presumed it to be fake, I figured the men in the image must have been digitally put in that setting because in my mind "no one would be that high up, sat like that without any safety harnesses". I was obviously pretty naive because when I found out that the image was real I was suddenly fascinated by it, it makes me feel a little sick just looking at it. Although it was not taken by Hine, it was taken by Charles Clyde Ebbets, you see that same theme as is running in Hine's images.