Old Work/New Ideas

The three images that I have chosen are from last fall semester during the Introduction to Photography course.  The first image is from a project where we were to carry an object around and photograph it.  After being with the toy soldiers for over 2 weeks I didn’t want to stop photographing them and for the next project I wanted to focus more on the toy soldiers and see what more I could do with them.  I liked playing around with the ambiguity of the toy soldiers, giving them a sort of life even though they were just objects.  Within the second project I still kept the ambiguity but I wanted to play with the lighting and silhouettes to give a little more drama to the images.  I wanted people to get up close and personal with my images not just look at them and walk away.  The artist who inspired me for these projects was David Levinthal who is known for photographing dolls and other figurines.  Levinthal doesn’t just take a picture of an object but creates a story and gives inanimate objects life.  I enjoyed this project and wouldn’t mind doing more things like it but I would also like to experiment with real subjects and I would like to add in color!  I would really like to move towards portraits or images involving human form.

I find myself always being drawn towards the image Afghan Girl, by Steve McCurry. Whenever I think of a portrait, an image of this girl pops into my head.  I first saw the image on the cover of the National Geographic magazine.  Her eyes had me captured. I like McCurry’s use of colors to bring out the Afghan girls eyes. Her red head wrap frames her eyes, which draw you in even more.  Her eyes are piercing and not to mention they pop right off the page.  In a lot of his portraits his subject's eyes are so telling as though you are not just looking at a picture but you are glimpsing into their soul.  McCurry’s use of color is astounding.  As I was going through a lot of his online galleries recently I couldn’t believe that I was missing so many powerful images.  I had to keep looking through them like I was obsessed.  Many of his images are colorful when needed to portray a certain emotion or mood.