When I first set out to produce this set of images I wanted to completely stage the memories that I was going to produce; like the works of Hannah Starkey as I mentioned but also like the works of other photographers such as ‘Paul M Smith.’ The set of images that I like the most and think relate most to the images I’m trying to produce are the ‘Make my night’ series (http://www.paulmsmith.co.uk/portfolio/make-my-night/make-my-night.html) This series deals with a certain part of today’s society but in an extensive and detailed reproduction. ‘Smith’ manages to reproduce many of the images that we would recognise from the screen of our own “point and shoot camera” but to the highest degree. “Using the snapshot as a stylistic template” means that the memory and experience of the photo immediately transposes to one of the viewers pre-existing memories especially within today’s youth culture; very much following ‘Goldberg’s’ theory that “lifelike images produce responses close to our reactions of actual people and events.”
The two images above show how closely ‘Smith’ has been able to reproduce the reality of youth culture today; ‘Smith’s’ images could be any young person’s memory apart from the fact that he is each of the subjects in the image. This means that ‘Smith’ retains the power of the experience not only as “the narrator… but… as well as the protagonist” a trait that he has produces in nearly all of his images. This is something that I don’t want to do with my images but is a technique that I could try and take into my future work as a spectacle of a certain subject being repeated again and again. The main aspects that appeal to me from this work are the techniques ‘Smith’ uses to reproduce the reality of a night out; something that I need to produce in my images if I am to produce a believable experience and memory for the viewer.
I soon realized that within the time I had I wouldn’t be able to set up images to this same standard and had to approach my photograph in a different way. Instead of staging my images in the sense of directing my subjects what to wear and how to sit within my photographs; I decided to photograph my friends and produce images which documented and produced memories of the everyday activities they carried out. The reason that I wanted to use my friends for this process and not complete strangers is the way in which they have become comfortable with having a camera pointed at them allowing me to document their real actions rather than an act we perform for the camera as talked about by ‘Smith’ in his work above. This also posed the question ‘When does a photograph become staged?’ Every time we take an image we are always looking for a certain subject acting within a certain context that we almost have a preset of in our minds meaning that many images seen to simply document reality can be argued as staged at least from the photographer. This is how I hope to capture my friends in a moment of action but not performance that I have pre-envisioned in my mind.
The inspiration for this envisioned photograph came when I was playing around with the flashgun I was using changing the strength on the flash and the surface I was bouncing it off.
Although this image is not of any great quality I really liked the way the light falls just above the computer screen in almost an upturned semi circle; the darkness in the rest of the picture seems to produce a truth and realness that transcends to me when looking at the image simply as a viewer. The techniques I used were to simply set the aperture of the camera on a low setting with reasonably high shutter speed for the amount of light within the room; I would then use the flashgun to bounce light off the wall above my subject or the ceiling but an amount that heavily effects the area above my subject almost pooling light onto the remainder of the photo. This picture is obviously too dark at the bottom and something I need to improve within my final images but I want to produce the same feel with the light above my subjects. The feeling that I get when looking at this photograph is similar to ‘Hannah Starkey’s’ work a paused moment within reality that as I mentioned earlier displays a truthfulness related to the lighting that somehow within the ideologies of society today leads the viewer to believe the image is a real memory and experience that if displaying the write content they can relate to their own lives much like ‘Starkey’s’ own images. (http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/hannah_starkey_butterfly.html)
