CONCEPTUAL PORTRAITS : Proposal

Conceptual Portraits Proposal :

My original concept for my project was confusion. The feeling of having so many emotions going around in your head that you just don't know what to think anymore. I was inspired by photographs taken by Guy Bourdin, Mario Sanchez Nevado and Rankin. I wanted to portray the feeling of being torn and lost within yourself and your own emotions. I wanted to shoot my images in the studio. I thought this would be the ideal place for what I wanted to do because I wanted to focus on the person and not have the background / location as a distraction. However, I tested this idea by trying to recreate images taken by Mario Sanchez Nevado and I didn't like them. Here is a shot from the group I tested with. I decided that it looked quite easy - just looks like a person stood behind a piece of painted glass. I want to push myself more than this, and make something more creative and abstract.

I have now decided that I want to take abstract pictures of body parts. I have been inspired by photographs taken by Edward Weston and Bill Brandt. I would like to kind of mix the two styles, take pictures from interesting angles like Brandt, but capture the femininity like Weston. I'm not exactly sure what the whole concept of my project is going to be, I just know that I want to take pictures of body parts and portray them in an abstract way. I am going to use my digital camera and I am going to convert them to black and white in photoshop afterwards. I am going to take my images in the studio - there is a grey background in there and I think this would be really nice when I turn my images black and white - it will look very soft and make my images have lots of different grey tones. I am going to experiment with different lighting but I think that I would just like to have one key light. This will make the images quite soft and not too bright - also having one key light will make shadows. I would really like to make shadows on body parts and capture them and accentuate them in editing afterwards. I would like my images to be quite simplistic. No props or fancy outfits - just bare skin on a grey background. I would like my images to look quite natural, and my model to either have no nail varnish on or a plain one which isn't chipped so the models hands/skin looks very well cared for. I am going to do various different shoots and experiment with composition and cropping. I will then edit my photographs to black and white and print them. I will aim to have anything between 3 and 7 prints, depending on the size and quality of them.