Final Outcome Intentions - Personal Project

For my final outcome, I plan to recreate my own photobooth style photographs but also mix them with the gothic techniques that I have been researching throughout this project. In terms of presenting them, I want to create lots of different styled photobooth 'strips' of images and present them on a pinboard, perhaps with a few of the best printed larger on a mounted sheet. They will be placed randomly on the pinboard to make them more interesting. I will edit the digital photographs on photoshop and will pay specific attention to making sure that there is a boarder around the images - perhaps inpsired by polaroid images. This will make them look more authentic as photobooth images, and will also make them look more interesting to the viewer.

Although I've moved away from my original idea of gothic fairytales, I still plan to keep with the gothic theme to make the images different and unique as apposed to just the normal expected photobooth/polaroid images. For each strip of images, I plan to create a new 'persona', for example in one image, the clothing and props could be quite girly, but in another gothic, and in another something else. I want to experiment by taking lots of different images and picking the best ones to go on my mounted sheet. On photoshop, I know that you can make the photographs look like a film strip, which could be an interesting presentation technique that I will have a look out to see if it works / looks any good with my photographs. I plan to mix colour photostrips with black and white and sepia photographs to make the pinboard look more interesting.

On some of the images, I might decide to scratch into them - to create the creepy, gothic feel, for example scratch over the eyes or the face or the props, etc... I could also mix some real negatives into my photographs and scratch onto those aswell. This will create a subtle yet interesting effect onto my images that will cause the viewers to look more carefully at the images individually.

Another idea is that I could tone some of the images with different coloured food dyes which will also create an unusual effect. I could tone images on photoshop as well. I think that overall, my outcome will look interesting and reflect the work that I've been studying throughout this project in some way. I think that the idea of creating different personas in the different photostrips is a unique idea and it will make the viewers pay more attention to see that it is me in all of the pictures.

 (image from google).


Mock up of final outcome :

Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director best known for her conceptual portraits. Some of her work has been displayed in French Vogue and also Harper's Bazaar. I personally like her work as it is interesting and unique. Some of photographs are self portraiture yet she looks different in each of them, so it really makes the viewer think about the photograph. I like this specific photograph above as the background is fairly basic - a brick wall and a lamp, however the model is looking away and it makes the viewer think about what she is looking at. In a lot of Cindy Sherman photographs, she is looking away from the camera at something beyond the camera, which is an interesting and repeated technique throughout her work. This photograph is from a collection called 'untitled film stills' in which she is the model in all of them. She didn't title the photographs to preserve their ambiguity. They are all shot in black and white and were taken between 1977-1980.

For my final outcome, I think that her work will be inspirational as I am planning to do self portraiture combined with Andy Warhol's photobooth technique. I particularly like the idea of the black and white images as they create more shadows and tones within the image, making them more effective. I also like how the model in the image seems distracted, or perhaps doesn't know that the photograph is being taken - or it is supposed to look like that to the viewer. This makes the photograph look more like a snapshot rather than a posed image, and I personally really like this technique.

What is interesting about Cindy Sherman is that she does everything for her photographs - the photographer, the model, the makeup artist, the wardrobe 'director', hair stylist etc... so the work is purely her own with no help from others, which I find very inspiring. This is what I have been doing for my own photographs this project. Some of her photographs are high fashion, yet some of hers are more classic like the photograph above - this shows interesting variety for the artist.

Ghost Experimentations Continued