Tuesday 12 February 2013

Spaces Digital Photographs.

Last minute I was told about Klaus Pichler's photographs of fruit rotting, this evoked me to photograph some fruit myself, apples and grapes were all that I had and because I needed them to rot, they wouldn't be ready to photograph for at least a week so I decided to photograph them every day to see the cycle of them gradually rotting. With the starting point of spaces, I thought that I could link this by explaining that it is the space around the fruit which rots it (which is what these photographs represent) rather than taking photographs of actual spaces.
I lay them out cut up so that they would mould/brown quicker, I lay them out in a compositionally good way so that I could see all of them and they didn't look too randomly placed. I photographed them from above (to view the whole of the fruit and the inside of it) and found that medium long shots were best for this, they didn't look as effective in colour as they did black and white, if I could do these photographs again I would give myself more time so that I can let them rot a great deal more, I would also consider a black back drop and taking the photographs in colour so that I could relate it more to Pichler's work.
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
I liked the visible change in these photographs but I don't think I would take this idea any further because of my own lack of personal interest in the subject matter, and how long it took because of the waiting in-between in photograph, I thought that I could perhaps experiment on how to enhance them, for example the visible texture could become quite interesting if I peeled the skin off of off apples and collaged them onto these photographs to involve colour in the photographs and a more layered up and interesting look.
Quite simple, lay slices on top of the photograph, created quite abstract shapes contrasting triangular pieces with circles of the apples the original picture was slightly too hidden even though this helped create a layered effect.
I cleared the amount of apples slightly to reveal more of the original photograph, this worked well and also having more of the red tones from the apple to mix with the yellow and peach to create a mixing of colours that are still in the same spectrum and don't contrast each other too much, this wouldn't work because of the contrast already there from the colour and the black and white.
Here the transparency of one of the slices looks like it is gradually blending into the grey tones of the actual photograph. The fresh apples carry the healthy colour and the rotten photograph symbolically sits in the dark.
Here I had a similar slice of apple to the large apple in the photograph peering in to give a clearer contrast, it didn't work as well without the red tones of the peelings.
Abstract triangular shapes again, build up layers and create a look of randomly dropping them down after dropping which shows the practical approach in the photographs.
The peelings have quite high transparency here, the reds are deep and the grey and black also look quite dark because of the lack of contrast from the apples being so rotten.
Flash from the photography made this slightly unsuccessful because of the look of over exposure around the middle, over than that the layering of the peelings worked well for tone and colour.
Kept the peelings at the bottom in the negative space of the original photograph to fill them in, the result here looked quite packed but I felt that that was the best way of taking these photographs.
I liked the practical process of producing these experimentations but it didn't evoke any more ideas in terms of taking my subject matter further, I felt that it was quite limited in this sort of method of photographing and using these as a subject matter because of lack of variation in my framing, although I felt shots from further away may not work as well because they would involve more of the background rather than the apples themselves, taking away the original meaning. So far I have enjoyed photographing the figure more in my Davidson inspired shoot, therefore I feel more determined to carry out that idea.

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