People-fine art-research

Fine art photography refers to photographs that are created in accordance with the creative vision of the photographer as artist. It is a notoriously difficult and hotly-debated description, with many different sources having many different opinions on what fine art means. I perceive fine art photography as to be something that is made purely for the act of creating something to look at, a personal impression.

i put a lot of thought into this and toyed around with some concepts before i settled on my final idea. I did think about doing some photographs in the derelict Blackburn royal infirmary and even took a visit there to take some test shots (below)



i was toying with a concept of the story i heard of a security guard hearing the sound of a little girl crying in the childrens ward of the old hospital, the first picture was actually taken in the childrens ward and the model Sara is jumping slightly off the ground to make it look as though she is floating.
the second image i was going for a neo-victorian style cameo but with an odd twist, hence the mask and the strange hand pose.

then i thought about doing a series on a corset piercing i photographed being performed, but eventually decided that it would be great for a single or couple of shots but for a series of at least 8, it would be difficult to make each one look sufficiently different.


in the end, i decided (with the help of my tutor) to do a series of 8 photographs inspired by victorian-style photography, and specifically Joel Peter Witkin.

Witkin was born in 1937 and prefers a hands-on type of photography, especially in the development. He scratches the negatives, bleaches/tones the print, being influenced by Daguerrotype and Ambrotype. His photographs have a very 'old' feel to them, very victorian and generally have quite disturbing subject matter- death, dismembered bodies, freaks of nature and the physically disabled.






i was given a doll that a friend of mine had made for her university course, she is proficient in special effects makeup and she had wrapped a childs doll in modrock (plaster bandages), then latex and carved a spine into the back and attached the wings of a dead pigeon to the back. I already had the idea to do a shoot with this doll in it and in the end decided to use the doll to create my portfolio, adapting the original idea i had (to have 2 girls, one in white one in black breastfeeding the doll) to cover 8 people, and do the pictures in a modern-yet-old style, like a nod towards victorian photography and the oddities Witkin photographed.