Carsten Witte

Carsten Witte is a 48 year old photographer who attended the Bielefeld school of photography. He really experiments with the use of shadows in his photographs. The photograph mainly relates to the starting theme of the five senses, however I think that it also relates well to the inner character theme. 

This photograph is very different from work I've seen before, as it incorporates the skeleton into the photograph. I created my own version below using makeup, but this one looks like it could be either double exposure with an image of a skull, or could have been drawn on to the model - either on set or edited in. I think that this would be an interesting photograph to add the 3D photography effect to. This photograph is from a collection titled 'Intuition', which features several photographs of women with this skeletal effect. What is interesting about this series, is that the skeleton art work is only on their faces, rather than continuing onto the rest of their bodies. 

"One main idea behind my work is the belief that everything is constantly changing but photography can preserve the moment. Beauty is almost nothing without the knowledge of how fast it will fade..."

 With these images, I feel like there is a juxtaposition between the innocence of the models - the fact that their hair is away from the face, and that they are not clothed, with the harshness of the skeleton pattern on their faces. I like how these shots are all close up head shots, as it creates a flow within the series, showing that there are similarities between each photograph, rather than just the skeletal features, as the models are different in every picture. With the harsh lighting, there are lots of shadows created, and the face has a strong contour to it. The lighting almost creates distortions to the face which is an interesting technique and something that wouldn't be too difficult to recreate myself. The use of the black background is interesting as the model's face appears to fade into the background, with the use of the lighting. 

Overall, I personally really like these images and I think that they are effective and unique. Although they are mainly related to the theme of the five senses, I think that they can relate to portraiture/inner character also, and in some ways they could also relate to my other chosen theme of movement and light, due to the extreme lighting conditions. 

For my personal experiments, I used black eyeliner and eyeshadow to create this skull effect. Although it doesn't quite replicate the work of Carsten Witte, I think that it works well. I think that to improve this, I should have used harsher lighting to create the effect of shadows and distortion.

my own experimentations :

black and white

colour

creating an effect similar to the original photographs.