In today’s workshop, we look at photo as a narrative. In this we looked at the difference between Implicit and Explicit photography and in what context to use them. Implicit photography’s purpose is to capture the reality and the art of life to tell storied through the art of photography, usually the message within the image is not expressly stated and more suggested so you have to look at the deeper meaning of the image. Explicit photography is more literal, it is what it is , the subject of the image is usually fully explained and you can usually make sense of it as just an image without any context. To help us understand this concept, we looked a at few examples and tried to work out weather they were implicit or explicit just by looking at them without any context. Within these examples we also looked at ways that images could be manipulated and given a totally different meaning when edited and put in a different context.
We were then set a task to explore Implicit photography. We were put in pairs for this task and we had the first 15 minutes to find out as much about each other as we could, for example, likes, dis-likes, fears, personality etc.. My partner was Hedd who liked doing a variety of different things from dressing up to skateboarding. Originally we were going to try and capture how our hobbies made us feel but we were told to dig a little deeper and find out something about the personality that could be captured. This is when our 15 minute chat got quite deep and serious, but we both decided that we liked the idea of the deeper feelings inside a person. For example, Hedd comes across as really chirpy and chilled however underneath hes always quite exhausted from a long day at work and then uni and he also struggles with making eye contact with people.
To turn this idea into an image, I thought that we could have him facing the camera but looking away to ‘avoid eye contact’. Originally we were going to have him looking like he was forcing a smile but we thought that people might not understand because it doesn’t highlight the idea that we wanted to get across.
This was the final image that we decided for Hedd’s portrait. To achieve this image we had a play on Photoshop, we cropped the image and also turned it black and white. We decided that we wanted to take the picture in front of a window by the graphics entrance so that you could see the building in the back ground because Hedd works as a cleaner at the uni so we thought that it would be appropriate to include it. We also liked this image because even though the idea of the eyes looking away was meant to be to avoid eye contact, it also gives the impression of tiredness due to his expression. We decided to turn the image black an white to highlight the fact that some of his personality is hiding in the shadows – half his face is light and half is slightly darker.
The next image is the final portrait of me by Hedd. Suffering with Anxiety means that I don’t cope well in crowds and busy places so we wanted to capture that fear in this image. The original idea for this was to have me smiling in the camera but looking away, however we decided that this accidental image worked a lot better in getting the point across. We liked the fact that it was blurry, as if i’d just been spooked by something without looking too terrified. We then edited this image on Photoshop, we decided to crop it so I was close to the left edge so it almost looked like I was escaping. We also had a play with the brightness and contrast to make it look more dramatic.
Although we had a really serious approach to this project, I feel like the overall results are good and the images came out well and gave off the impressions we wanted them to have. If I were to do this project again I think I would have had a bit more of a play around with the different angles, maybe taking my image from slightly above to almost make me look vulnerable and scared. I would have also liked to have spent a bit more time editing the images to explore how expressive we could have made them.
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Lorna Simmonds 