User:Maruša

Section 1

WHAT A triptych of photographs. You can see three black and white photographs, each showing a body in a form that is not clear. There are black and white lines on the bodies that can help with understanding the plastic of the form. The black lines disappear into the background, which is pitch-black with no elements to tell you about the surrounding and the place the body is put. You can recognise a hand, an arm, a leg, but they are not connecting as they were supposed to. On any of the pictures is a trace of a head. A line of underpants can be seen on one of the bodies and it looks like lace, so this might be a woman.

HOW Everything started with a project that was given to us by a professor. First we had to pick one of our favourite photographers and present him/her to the class. After that, we had to pick one of his/hers photo, analyse it and then transform it into our language with a photographic media. I picked a young photographer Lukasz Wierzbowski, who at the time was taking photos for himself and posting them on instagram. He shoots on colour film, almost always using flash and each photo contains a human being, usually a woman. He puts them into positions unusual for every day, like hanging on a fence like a towel or shoving their head into a bush. I picked a photo where a girl is lying on the floor with her head under a rug and there is a leak of sunshine falling on her hands. First I decided that I will just copy the photo to come closer to him and to understand it more. Second I tried a little different at home with a phone flash covered with two fingers so there was only a light leak, and a camera in other hand. It was difficult but it worked. For ending an project I booked a studio at school for three hours. I asked my friend if he would be my model even though he would have to be almost naked. He agreed. I set up a grey background and the flash with a window blind in front of them and put him in the middle. The floor was cold for his feet. We started shooting, I was just taking photos of him so he would get comfortable with a camera in his face. He was still very stiff so I put on some music to set an atmosphere and it worked. I asked him to start dancing, trying to imagine that he is a plastic bag being tossed around by the wind, hitting stuff, transforming into every state a bag can get to (crushed, scraped, inflated,..). He was doing great and after two hours I was satisfied with the material I gained. Later at home I made a selection of three and put them in photoshop where I applied a lot of contrast so there wouldn't be much grey tones, 'painted' the background in black and erased the head.

WHY I was working on this project at a time when I did not really know what is my path in the future. I could say that sometimes I am a little lost in my head. Sometimes I do not understand people, they do not understand me. I can get confused. they can get confused. But at the end it doesn't matter if people get it or not, all that matters is that you know what you are doing at the moment and you are fine with it. That is why I loved the photos with hidden heads. I saw their body but not their face. Face and face expression can tell you a lot about a person. But body, thrown over a fence like a towel doesn't. To wrap it up because I am running out of time is that I wanted to make some photos with unknown space (where I was standing at the time) with a structure of the body What is this doing here? How did that come there? Am I holding the picture right? Maybe it should be upside down. And where are the heads? It is confusing. But there is a flaw.

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