Paper making

I used old collections of newspapers, magazines and cards to create a variation of colours. I tried to create thicker and thinner types of paper as well as trying to make the paper look more authentic and rustic by making the edges of paper rugged and worn.

Final photo outcome

Portraiture is an art form that appears to have its restrictions; a minimal selection of poses and facial features, a small number of filters that don’t make the body look funky, and a few original portrait accounts.  

I attempted to experiment while taking these images, setting out to take the photos from an alternative perspective.

For my final outcome I took inspiration from my previously searched artists such as Isabella Babola. Babola worked closely with using a mirror in some of her work which I tried to incorporate into my own. Similarly, I tried to embody Vivian Maier’s shadow reflection photos, manipulating the useful sunlight to elongate my stature just as Maier had done.

 

Artist Research- Man Rays

Besides being an artist in the genre of surrealism and dadaism, Man Ray also belongs to the list of famous self-portrait artists. Man Ray’s image, Self-Portrait with Computer, features him holding a camera that highlights his call. It looks like famous artists who painted their own self-portraits with their brushes in hand. During his life, Man Ray started playing with self-portraits by wearing various costumes. He tried on women’s clothes, turbans, and not to express the richness of his personality in shots. In the many self-portraits, Man Ray formed his enigmatic persona. 

He made it. Once upon a time he described himself as an artist who “so deforms a topic that almost masks the identity of the original, and it produces a new type.” By playing with methods of this nature as a flower, multiple exposure, and a camera-less rayograph, Man Ray has shown how mutable the image of some kind the human, the material, or the creative medium might be. 

Man Ray is well known for his deep body of photographic work, which includes fashion, portraiture, and technical experimentation, such as solarization, and well-known photograms or “rayographs”: the artist created these persuasive photographs without a shutter, arranged objects contained on photosensitive sheets of paper, and exposed them to light. His art coincided with Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism—all while maintaining its own distinct style.  

 

Artist Research- Vivian Maier

Since the Second World War and into the 1950s, Americans prioritised and idealised the conventional notion of family and, along with it, marriage and motherhood. Vivian Maier, born in 1926, was a young woman in the 1950s. Her photography career, and her self-portrait of 1953 particularly, is historically significant because it gives insight into her distinctive experience as a working-class woman with no husband, no children, and also no higher education. Maier’s self-portrait reflects a denial of gendered stereotypes and shines light on the invisibility of the single, childless adult and child care worker.  

Before her death in 2009, Vivian Maier’s photograph was new to the press. She used art as a means of removing herself from her everyday life as a nanny. She’s taken more than 150,000 photographs all the time. In several of them, she set in place fascinating suggestions for self-portrait photography. Vivian’s portrait was seen in mirrors or window reflections as she watched Chicago’s life from the side. Looking at her shots, you see how Vivian wanted to be portrayed in real life, rather than her actual portrait.