PROJECT: PHOTOSHOOT

One of my last projects was a photoshoot inspired in a Vogue shoot of March 2005, "Larger than Life" by the photographer Laurie Bartley. We were given an object and ours was a shoe and we also had to find 5 words related to the shoot we were going to take inspiration of. We choose: Hitchcock, American vintage, confident, use of shade/ light and dramatic.

The aim was to end up with 3 x A3 colour or black and white photographs that would tell a story.

Our artist statement was:

A vintage feel the art work, with an ominous almost prying aspect to it. The colours in the work are quite warm which contrasts with the cold hard message the work displays. As the tryptic progresses the colours become cooler as the subject matter becomes darker.

We used a DSLR to take our photos, and decided to use natural lighting much like in the Larger than Life shoot in order to project a superficial sense of innocence onto the shoot in order to contrast with the dark storyline and attempt to avoid clichés.

We decided to rely on location and prop heavily in our shoot, again trying to create a sense of realism, allowing the viewer to relate to the events, making the story more engaging. We wanted to make the photos look as though they were taken on a polaroid camera, since it was in the 50's.

We were heavily inspired by Laurie Bartley’s 2005 vogue shoot Larger than Life, we wanted to follow the same sort of dramatic story line in a cinematographic style. In addition to this we were very much influenced by the work of Alfred Hitchcock and his use of suspense.

We decided to use the story line of an affair, leaving the perpetrator up to the viewer, but making the murder weapon clear. The shoe. We decided to play off the ‘killer heels’ pun. We initially attempted to use a poorer quality camera as we thought it would give us the vintage appearance we desired. This didn’t work and we were forced to reshoot the whole thing and add the vintage effect in post-production using Photoshop.

I loved doing this, not only because I love photography but also because I discovered new places in Nottingham and become really closer to one girl of my group.

Bellow you will be able to find our shoot.

Because we made the notes on the printed photographs to look more real and we had to give them I can not show you the final version but as soon as I get them back I will update this post.

Don't forget to take a look at my Tumblr. I update it daily. http://carlota-b-lopez.tumblr.com

(C.L)