Youtube continues to ruin Quality. Moving image short film about memories and thoughts of a road kill victim.

conceptualising your own work

I have chosen to look at Francesca Woodman as her work continues to inspire and fascinate me with its dreamlike qualities and an almost melancholy feel. Answers of what her work is about often cause mayhem in my mind. Much of the time my opinions and answers change about certain photos and I can never quite put my finger on one exact idea of what its trying to express. This I love, The unnerving quality of what she’s trying to say which kind of feels quite personal to the viewer. As she is usually naked and bare. Woodman for me is definitely a Queen of self-portraits as she appears frequently in pretty much all her photo’s in some way or another, Sometimes with just a hand other times everything.

 All of the work I’ve seen seems to always be quite odd and unsettling; I’ve never seen any of her work not in black and white either. Most photos’ she seems to almost blur and camouflage herself into the surroundings purposely. Photographs techniques she uses are long exposures to create a slight blur and obviously some form of self timing the camera. The work she does using Long exposures are for me unmistakable when going through her work compared to the ones which are clearly not long exposures. The main feature with her unusual presence in the photo’s is also the presence she doesn’t have in the photos, she always seems to be not quite here, not quite there which is quite a personal feeling which I feel she actually had. With Her short life and never really seeming to reach any real recognition she did later go on commit suicide at the age of only 22. So I believe this feeling of her isolation and being here but not, Seen in her work, Is however I feel a real reference to herself. In other photographs she uses a variety of  strange and possibly symbolic props to create a dreamlike and bizarre feel to the images which remind me of people such as Man Ray and even Dali..The images also Follow similar ideas similar to the surrealist movement, Such as not explaining work and demonstrating a desire of appearances. Another similar artist I did find to Francesca was Duane Michals whose photos I also find very inspiring and do seem to do quite similar photo's and ideas, Yet I feel lack the personal feel to Francesca’s work which I do always feel about her work. The feeling of a very one to one viewing. Almost like its private.

Francesca’s style of photography seems to have this importance for the background being very simple, Yet keeping places to hide. I think this idea of hiding away from the camera is playful yet quite sad and adds emotion to some of her photos. Naturally being inspired by Francesca the work I created flowed very easily and the ideas to my image all came together very easily. For my idea behind this piece I needed to use two photo’s instead of one to perhaps show what I wanted to represent easier.I edited and put them together on Photoshop, (Not necessarily a tool Francesca would of used but for me personally I found it easier to recreate her style through this medium.) My piece looks at a very personal and general issue of life, I named the title of my piece ‘I used to be safe’ the piece covers themes of perceptions of ourselves, Birth and how we live in constant fear of time. I thought it would be an image which would be unusual and very open to interpretations. After asking a few people what they thought it was about. It was nice to know my idea was different and the image very open to different perceptions, as this is what I wanted. So I am quite pleased with the outcome.