"Christ, they'll be bringing those bank machine things round next year!"

Last week were lucky enough to have the photographer Gary Salter come into Uni to give us a talk and tell us about his work. Gary has created images for companies such as Absolute Radio, Shreddies, Uncle Ben’s, Pimms, Bulmers and LG. It was really interesting to learn about the photography industry from someone first hand. I really like that Salter seems to take his inspiration from life and events that happen to him or his friends. He said that he carries a camera everywhere to keep a diary with it and carries a notebook to note down any funny or interesting things that happen that he could use for inspiration. 

For example he went to a show where he saw that they were giving "knitting lessons to grannies" and amongst all these elderly ladies was a young 24 year old man doing some knitting. Salter obviously found this amusing and so noted this down and used it as a starting off point for this next picture of a biker knitting club. I love the attention to detail in his image, like the knitting needles of the wall in the shape of the cross bones, and the cake on the table in front of the figure on the far left was actually a knitted cake that belonged to his set designer. 

He gave a good insight into how you would actually go about organising a commercial shoot. You have to scout locations, find a selection of props and models for the client to choose from, sometimes you have to find several different locations for the same image. I hadn’t realised the extent to which the images are photoshopped together. He showed us his sketches and plans for this advert for Bulmers. The bottle itself was shot in a studio, the fountain was shot at one location, the feet were in a swimming pool at another location, these are all then brought together seamlessly.

I think his work is really funny and people can relate to his pictures. One of my favourite images of his is the one below. He told us that after Halloween he and his friend's had been talking about how greedy the trick or treaters were getting and he had said "Christ, they're going to turn up with one of those bank machine things next year!" and from that came the inspiration for this image. Some of his work remind me of Martin Parr's, in that he takes comical pictures of life in Britain, humorous yet relatable.

"I do believe in fairies, I do, I do...."

 During research for a project at Uni, I stumbled across the story of the Cottingley Faires. I remember being a kid and being fascinated when watching the film Fairy Tale based on the story. Two teenage cousins borrowed their uncle/dad’s camera and went down to the bottom of the garden where they took photos of what they claimed were fairies. You can imagine the surprise on the father’s face when he was in his darkroom developing the photos of the girls, only for a fairy to appear dancing in front of them. However he didn’t believe that they were real, although he couldn’t figure out what trickery they had performed. Eventually the photos found their way into the hands of Edward Gardner, the leader of a spiritualist group. Gardner sent the photos and negatives off to a photographic expert to be examined, the result, he was told, was the there had been no tampering with the negatives, the expert did not go as far as to say that the photos showed fairies but that "these are straight forward photographs of whatever was in front of the camera at the time". They also came to the attention of Arthur Conan Doyle who, like Gardner, insistently believed they were genuine photos of fairies. Looking at the photos now, they are so fake looking, crude and badly done that it’s hard to think that anybody, least of all an intelligent, well-educated writer such as Conan Doyle would ever believe these were real. Both spiritualists, they published the photos as proof that fairies existed. The girls later admitted that the photos were fakes, that they had copied drawings of fairies from storybooks onto card and propped them up in front of the camera. Yet two children, with little to no photographic expertise managed to fool the World. How and why did they manage it? Who knows, maybe people just really wanted to believe that there was more out there. Maybe they were fooled because they wanted to be fooled…?

I find it interesting that when someone has a photograph of something, we almost immediately take it for granted that it is real, photography is the medium we trust to show us the truth. With all the images that surround us today we tend to take them at face value. The images on the news are there to pose as proof that the story is real, that these events and these people are really in the World somewhere. I just find it interesting that photos are used as a representation of reality in an age where digital alternation is so easy and assessable to whoever wants it. And we are all guilty of it, myself included. I know that the women in fashion magazines have been Photoshopped to perfection, yet it still doesn’t stop me from having those few seconds where I think “wow she has the most perfect skin/boobs/legs, why can’t mine be like that”. And then I have to remind myself, it’s NOT REAL. Who knows, maybe in 50 years time people will look back on airbrushed images of our time and think “that’s so fake and badly done, how can anyone have ever thought that was reality”.

First Blog, Brace Yourselves for the Excitement...

Ok so here's my first blog. I'm new to this blogging business so am not entirely sure what i'm supposed to fill this space with. I will use it to note down ideas and inspiration and share any work, mine or of others, that might be of interest to others.

I will start off by giving you a taste of some of the photography that I like by surrealist photographer Herbert Bayer. They are shot on black and white film and would have been created in a darkroom. They remind me that you don't need a computer or technology in order to create great surreal images. Growing up in the digital age I have become accustomed to forgetting how easy we have it in terms of photographing and editing our images. With a digital camera you can see then and there on the LCD screen roughly how your image will look and change your technique accordingly, you don't have the mystery and suspense that comes with film photography. Once home you can pop your memory card in the computer and photoshop it to your heart's desire. Problems? There's a help section and endless "Photoshop for Dummies..." style books on hand to spoon feed your way through to the final edit. I'm not against Photoshop, I think that to learn it well is an art form in itself but I like to look back at old photos like these and remind myself to not take this for granted and appreciate the hard work that would have gone into images like these.

(left) Bayer's Self Portrait in Mirror. The use of photomontage to fragment the body makes it seem almost fake and plastic, like a doll. Bayer was one of the modernists who used the process of collage and photomontage to deconstruct the apparent "realism" of photography.








(right) Lonely Metropolitan is probably Bayer's most well known image. I love the juxtaposition of all the elements, the strange arrangement presents us with a dream like image that conveys a sense of loneliness and alienation in an urban landscape. I think the eyes looking straight into the camera are quite haunting.

Lonely Metropolitan was the inspiration for the monster in the Guillermo del Toro film Pan's Labyrinth (below left). This is an image that I am constantly being seen reproduced by amateur and student photographers. Below right is what I would consider to be a good homage to this, photographed/created by friend James Sheppard. This is also an example of how art/photography/film all feed off each other and continue to borrow and recycle old ideas.