There are many quotes addressing the point of photography and reality, most of them named 'Photography vs. Reality' many people beileve that captured images are in fact reality but yet others argue that a photograph is simply an image which expresses someone elses reality; this is the theory that I agree with. From all genres and aspects of photography images are composed by different people in different ways, for example holiday 'snaps' are taken in different ways, some take them straight and as they are but others may slant the camera to make things look surreal. In the fine art and conceptual photographic world images are composed and designed to highlight points about all kinds of ideaologies. A quote from Susan Sontag's 'On Photography' states this: "To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed" this quote I feel sums up how people photograph things when they have a camera in hand. This is why I believe that the photographic world is in fact not reality at all but instead just an idea or ideal which the photographer makes for themselves. This point also reflects how I feel about the viewers of the images, when people view images everyone has a different opinion of what they are looking at and whats going on in the images. For example the image below, which could be seen and read in many different ways.
In the image is a skull, candle, shell, money, egg and books. The reality of this image is that is whats there but allegoricry the image is looking at a much wider subject area, the reality of the image is life and death but it all depends on how you look at it. The point I'm trying to make is that the reality of an image is what you make of it, leading onto my ideas for a proposal.
In my project reality I am going to create 4 - 6 enviromental portraits of the same person but placed within different enviroments, clothes and styles to confuse the viewers. The idea being that the images shall look like normal enviromental portraiture images except the difference is the reality of the images are warped because they are completly constructed. One of the images I compose may be the true reality but it will not matter as the idea of creating false portraits is to allow the viewer to create the own 'reality'.
I plan on creating my portraits to a square format, either using a 6x6 medium format camera or if I have no access to one then 35mm camera with images cropped down to give the similar effect. I believe that when creating portraits, using a square frame evens the image out, in comparison to using portrait 35mm. My images are going to be constructed similar to the works of Lother Wolleh who created amazing linear portraits which incorporated elements of architectural photography as well as well thought out, precise image composition. He is one of the main inspirations to this project, with the way his portraits capture something about the person he’s photographing and also the way he uses the environment within the image to guide the viewers eyes into the centre where the person would be standing.
Technically I plan on shooting on location with as I said either a 35mm or 6x6 camera, whether or not I shall be using flash shall depend on the lighting conditions of where I end up shooting my images. In the way of what film I shall use I plan on using a film with ISO400 as I feel its the film best of most lighting conditions. I shall be using ISO400 but whether to go for colour portraits and use Kodak Portra 400VC or to create tonal contrasting images with the Ilford Delta 400 film is something I am still thinking about.
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