Hello world

I am quite stoked to explore photo manipulation in this project. I decided to look into surrealist self-portraiture photographers.

Brooke Shaden

Brooke Shaden explores darkness and light in people and her portraits are strong in the concept of juxtaposition. She uses herself as majority of her subject as it’s a window into her life. I studied Brooke’s works and identified some common stylistic choices in her work.

“I noticed early on that I loved using the square format, and that has come to define my style. The square format almost reminds me of a window, allowing the viewer to see past a photograph and into a new world,”  said Brooke.

Using a square format in her pictures, it is remnant of medium format cameras and toy cameras such as Holga and Diana. As there is clear that the image is manipulated, it removes this belief that is from the fact that photoshop was not possible in the era of medium format cameras.

Brooke further justifies this by utilising this opportunity in a storytelling aspect as it is in a way, a window to the world of dreams, like stepping through a wardrobe into the world of Narnia.

It is very apparent that Brooke’s works are inspired by surrealism paintings. The texture, the lighting, the wardrobe, the colors echo the styles of paintings. There is a strong sense of make believe with painterly pictures, that we can be imaginative – we could turn grass purple, we could make it snow indoors, or we can even make people levitate. Using little details like texture and colors, we evoke the sense of paintings and it is as though we are looking at a hyper realistic painting when it is in fact, a picture.

Brooke’s works always feature one to two characters. They tell the mood, the story and the emotion of the piece through wardrobe and poses. If it is a mood piece, it is blue or white, if it’s a piece about innocence, they usually be wearing white. This careful attention to detail tells the story through colors of wardrobe and color of the work itself.

Alex Stoddard

Alex Stoddard works are much more darker in narrative/storytelling as compared to that of Brooke Shaden and Kyle Thompson. His work features more muted warm tones and depict darker themes such as fear, death and loss.

His stories echo certain fables such as featuring, characters such as wolves, rabbits or birds. This adds to the surrealistic worlds that he builds by including characters from a make believe story and adds to his whimsical nature to his pictures.

Kyle Thompson

I first saw Kyle Thompson’s photos when he appeared on Yahoo News in 2012. I was intrigued by the world he creates, the tones and how he builds dream-like worlds that are somehow life-like than painterly like Brooke Shaden’s.

Unlike Brooke’s focus on storytelling, his stories are more open-ended and he defines his work as “the collapse of narrative” and “there is no defined storyline with a beginning and end”.

1.  Attention to color

Kyle Thompson’s works feature an element of attention to color. He utilizes split toning to bring a film-like look to his images.

Sometimes he features analogous color harmonies or triadic color harmonies. For example in the image above, he uses purple and orange, and he uses green and blue cold tones.

Unlike Brooke Shaden, Kyle Thompson does not confine himself to a square frame or a full body shot. He exlpores using hands, lips, legs and other parts of his body.  This intrigued me as he expresses emotions and story even without a face or a body language of a character.

 

Conclusion 

All in all, both artists features surreal storytelling by using photo manipulation to bring people into either a dream world or bringing  the impossible into realistic.

They derive inspiration from fables, paintings or just to convey a narrative from the head. Through creative photo manipulation, they build intrigue to pictures that are far beyond the conventional photography.

okay, bye.