The Commission, appraisal.

The commission - For this project I wanted to make a statement about fast throwaway fashion and how people would rather spend money on clothes that do not last very long than repair or even recycle their clothes and save themselves money. Fast throwaway fashion is found in high street shops such as primark, H & M, TK Max and such.


Research


I felt that it was important to look into several different fashion photographers to better understand the area of photography that I want to venture into. I found some of Rankin's work to be quite useful in the way that he experiments with cardboard cutouts to create another layer within the image, this relates to my work because I have created another layer by building up strips of newspaper to suggest my idea of recycling. After looking into specific fashion photographers I looked at catalogues and websites for high street stores to get an idea of what their imagery was like. This helped me decide how to place my images e.g. what lighting to use, the general poses and clothes that would be found at these shops, this meant that the viewers should be able to place the items of clothing easier and understand what is going on. This lead me to people like John Stezaker, Julie Cockburn and Melinda Gibson, they create new images by using composites of several old images or in Julie Cockburn's case using items from old electronic games. I didn't want to copy Stezaker or Gibson by using old photographs as this would also not fit in with my concept but the idea of cutting up my images and replacing those parts with a local newspaper did work. Looking at high street shops and the way that they manufacture vast amounts of clothes I thought that it would be appropriate to look into Andy Warhol's work where he used the same image of Marilyn Monroe and the Campbell's soup over and over, I made some digital tests in which the comment of these is about over consumption and the fact that people will go and buy new clothes that are the same as what they already have because they do not want to repair or recycle as purchasing new items is easier. After having my tutorial it was discussed that this idea was far to simplistic and that by doing this my message wouldn't be as good because people would just think about Warhol's work.

Links to my blog posts for The Commission:
http://lukecharlesblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/commission.html
http://lukecharlesblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/commission-developed-idea.html
http://lukecharlesblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/commission-tests-and-finals.html


Rankin

Mert and Marcus

Miles Aldridge

Images from H & M

John Stezaker

Melinda Gibson

Julie Cockburn

Andy Warhol

Digital tests

Contact sheets

Final prints

Self evaluation


My final images could be placed either within a fashion publication or a newspaper because of the comment about fast throwaway fashion that I am trying to get across to people.
I feel that my time management for this project has been much better than the last project, I have been able to do more test shoots and progress my ideas more from this. I do feel that I could have staggered my time in the darkroom rather than print my images in one day, as this lead to a poor crop in one of the images in which you can see part of a chair due to me having to shoot in my flat as there was no studio space at uni.
The most challenging part of this project has been trying to come up with something that is original and understandable, to overcome this for future projects I think that by doing more in depth research into more photographers, artists, designers etc would be extremely helpful.

The commission tests and finals

When I had my tutorial with Steffi it was discussed that the backup shoot (above) didn't work as well as my idea of cutting up the images and using the newspaper to suggest the idea of recycling clothes. So I did another two shoots on Monday, one on location and the other in a studio. The backup shoot was an idea to show that you are able to recycle other peoples clothes from charity shops, but it was a bit too literal and simple.

I wanted to keep the shoots quite similar in respect to the clothing and poses, I made sure that all the clothes were from high street stores such as Primark, TK Max etc as these are the stores that thrive on selling fast throwaway fashion.

I have decided that I would like to print the studio shots rather than the location as they do not work as well. If a better location had been found then this may have been used instead.


Test strips

Final test strip for this image, colour is balanced on the skin tones.

The test strip on the left is slightly too red so I had to make some small adjustments to colour correct the image.

I may have dodged the image above a little too much, as you can see very distinctive lines on the edges of the print.


Here are the three images that I printed in the colour darkroom that I will be using as my finals. I still need to cut parts out from the images and put the newspaper in like the tests I had done with some of my digital images.

Contemporary fashion designers.

Another thing that we were told to look in to was contemporary fashion as at the moment our work is very much stuck in the 1950's. 

Some designers that jumped out at me are:

Lanvin

Autumn/Winter 2012-13 collection

http://www.lanvin.com/#/en/collections/premiere/lookbook-WW2012 

Monique Lhuillier

Autumn/Winter 2012-13 collection

http://moniquelhuillier.com/

Jil Sander

Some elements of 1950's styling on the website but cannot seem to find the dress from the image below.

http://www.jilsandernavy.com/summer?lang=en#info-summer-ready-wear 

Prada

Prada's current s/s campaign is very 60's inspired unfortunately for us, but the picture above is from an archive so I might have better luck looking there.

http://www.prada.com/ 

Current campaign image:

Set test.

I had a model cancellation and decided that instead of wasting the studio time me and Salvador could build a mock of our set using poly boards and test the lighting to get an idea of how much space we will need.

We tried slightly different lighting for this test as it is always a good idea to try new set ups as one may work better than another. Looking at the images below it feels that we were quite close to the lighting that we wanted but not quite there. We talked about it after we had finished and felt that it would have worked much better having the hair light that we had yesterday when casting.

As you can see quite rough tests but it gives us a better idea of what we are working towards.

We also had a tutorial after this where it was discussed that we should continue with our tests, but using a hasselblad and testing through the lenses because this is what we will be using and will be more accurate for getting the shots that we want.

It was also discussed that even though we have found a model that will work very well for our image we should continue with casting but look at new faces on model agencies. My next post will be looking at the new faces and picking models that will best suite our concept and then getting in contact with the agencies and asking if I can test these models.

Casting day.

Today was the day that I had organised for some models to come along for a casting for our final production. It was also an opportunity for me and Salvador (lighting lead) to work together to test the lighting.

The lighting references that we looked at were from Jill Greenberg:


Greenberg uses quite a number of lights which give a very dramatised and plastic look to the subjects. She hasn't just used this for photographing humans, Greenberg has also photographed bears, monkeys and other animals with the final outcome being this same plastic look.
The lighting for our image is as important as the casting, without the correct model and the correct lighting the narrative will not work and the final image will just look like a pastiche of a 1950's dining room.

Lighting diagrams for the day:

This was the first set up that we had, which gave an alright look but we were not keen on it as the beauty dish was putting far too much light on to the background, we did a few quick tests on each other before the first model came in but changed the set up after she had left as we were still not happy.

Fortunately for the next set up we had quite a bit of time before the next model came in so we were able to get a much better lighting set up than before and this one really gave us the plastic dramatised look that we were going for.