Whilst researching fashion photography for my upcoming shoot at Canon Shoot the Show at London Fashion Week, I spotted that there is an exhibition of Horst at the V&A museum London from 6th September – 4th January. I felt it would provide a great opportunity to get some ideas about what can be done with light and see how fabrics and models behave in front of the camera. This more than lived up to my expectations and proved to be a source of inspiration not only for the fashion shoot but for the rest of my photography.

At the start of the exhibition you are introduced to Horst through a brief biography and a corridor of black and white photographs depicting fashion from the 1930s. This moves through the development of his style with light or in some cases the lack of it which makes some images very “dark” and quite moody. It clearly shows the lengths he went to create these images, using elaborate backgrounds and sets, in some cases at quite some cost.

At the end of this section of the exhibition were a set of mannequins displayed with some copies of the dresses worn in some of the previous images. What struck me was how small women were (1930s). Apparently the museum had to have the mannequins especially made for this exhibition as modern mannequins are too big! The other thing I noticed about the dresses on display was the lack of colour in them, cream or black, although what they lacked in colour they certainly made up for in pattern.

The next open room in the exhibition focussed on Horst’s time with Salvador Dali. Here was the truly weird and I really wasn’t sure about some images such as the Lobster picture (and I like surrealism). You are able to see Horst’s sketch books and a good selection of images that show how Horst experimented and managed to create some truly surreal

Moving on through to his next section, “The wall of Fame” as I called it, with many of the Hollywood greats of the time. Marlene Dietrich in an iconic picture looking to me more natural and less dramatic than I have seen in other pictures of her. There were many stars including Bette Davis, Rita Hayworth, Vivien Leigh, Noël Coward, Ginger Rogers and Joan Crawford. You can see how Horst showed his skills at manipulating light in these images, which is almost as important as the stars themselves. These effects have been mimicked by many since (Madonna springs to mind in her music video, aptly named”Vogue”).images.

The next section was a very small but significant section on Horst’s travels and some natural world images, the first on display to include colour. The travel images mainly focus on his stay in Iran in the 1940s after falling in love with a British diplomat, Valentine Crawford.  These include shots of traditional tribesmen going about their lives or naturally posed in portraits and several of key landmarks. Here I got a sense of  “recording time” particularly in his set of images of Persepolis, a place I have been fortunate enough to visit and photograph (including some of the same ruins and reliefs Horst shot). This section made me smile as I recognised these landmarks and remembered taking similar if not the same angles and views myself.

Next I came to the small but interesting natural world exhibits where I could see the influence of his time spent with Dali coupled with his love of playing with light to create shapes and views you might not normally associate with this type of subject. The crisp stunning detailed images of the shells really caught my eye. I was interested to see how he managed to create artistic and pleasing images void of people, different from the images people normally associate him with. His idea was to produce patterns and repeats that could be used for wallpaper and textiles.

Nearing the end of the exhibition you are dazzled by the section on his time producing covers for Vogue magazine. Starting from 1935 there were some 90 covers in a display cabinet (they looked like original copies) with some key editions enlarged on the walls. Many of the covers reflected the surrealism I’d seen earlier in the exhibition, but were now in colour, whilst others went back to his work in the 1930s. The sheer riot of colour was an assault on the eyes, all be it a pleasant one! As the covers spanned several decades, they documented without words women and fashion through the years and the changing manner in which women have been portrayed.

The final section of images are almost sculpture like photographs of nude male men in a variety of tasteful poses which again accentuate the shadows created by light from different angles on the body. Here I saw that it was not the face (as in many other of his images) but the body and it’s form (in Greek god style) that he was looking to get the viewer to focus on. All of these were in black and white (or shades of grey) and left me admiring the sheer beauty of his work.

I could have easily spent another few hours looking at Horst’s work (there were some 250 photographs). Inspired by Horst I was inspired to capture different elements of fashion when I attended Canon Shoot the Show and have included in that write up a selection of the more non conventional images I took. I obviously did not have the control over the models and their poses that Horst did, or access to different lighting and backgrounds, but I still felt inspired to move away from just front on full length runway shots.

All Horst images contained in this post are freely available from Google Images (04/10/2014) and are not my own work.

Viviane Sassen At The Photographer’s Gallery

Spurred on by my visit to the Horst Exhibition at the V&A earlier last year my tutor made me aware that Viviane Sassen was exhibiting at the Photographer’s Gallery. With one thing and another I made it just before the exhibition closed on January 18th 2015! It was very definitely worth it.

Throughout the entire duration of the exhibition admission was free from 10am – 12pm, an added bonus. There are five floors to this very striking brick building which is tucked away off the main and very busy Oxford Street, down some steps between two shops, opening out into a small walk through plaza. Very old London Town.

This was a visually physical moving exhibition across two sides on the top floor of the gallery. In the first side of the exhibition you are greeted by slide show one, vertical images like super models on a catwalk in a continuous loop.

The second side had blocks to sit and view a 45min show which was much more attention grabbing. I took the opportunity to  video it as others around me were, not only to remind myself of the plethora of images I had seen but to capture the clever design of the exhibition display which lent itself perfectly to this slide show. Again this was fashion show style but this time it was in both landscape and portrait orientation. I shot two videos hand held, the second one is on this link.

The first thing that impacted me was the sheer volume of images that I was about to witness. I was left wondering over what period of time these were produced in, something I could have asked her myself if I had got to the “Breakfast Artist Talk” she gave at the gallery at the end of October 2014!

There have been many comments about the riot of colour she uses in her work, some I think reflecting her early life in Kenya, where clothes can be brightly coloured. I wonder if this use of dark and light becomes almost natural to the eye when it is constantly part of your surrounding environment. Many of the images contained a noticeable unmissable dominant colour, whether it was a splash or an accent. I saw that she wasn’t frightened of using this, not only in the backgrounds or clothes, but actually as paint on the models themselves. Other times she adds colour post-production. I was inspired to see so many different ways that she brings or sometimes excludes colour from her pictures. I wished I had seen her work during my previous module in TAOP, especially when I was working on the colour section. It would have made it so much clearer how to use colour and I have made a good note of this for future consideration, not just the amounts of colour used but the contrasts, complimentary colours, items of colour, use of natural colour and just the different ways you could use it.

I couldn’t help thinking whilst watching the show that if I was one of her models I would feel she worked me really hard! Although this would probably be a welcome change after walking the catwalk as stiffly as possible and without expression. I got a sense of her constantly pushing the boundaries of what you normally see when looking at people photography. Models are shown in a variety of poses, but none of them looking artificial or contrived more organic and interesting, even challenging.

It is not just the positioning of her subjects but the different views and techniques she uses that give her images such impact and make them so inspiring. This includes the use of double exposures, post-production using overlay or light painting, using silhouette, mirror, juxtaposition, combining bodies to make one, nudity, contrast (colour and B&W), orientation (taking a picture one way and then displaying it another to create illusion) and so it goes on. You will not be bored when looking at her work and I expect she wasn’t when she was shooting it, or the models when posing I suspect.

Although there are many images  where the subjects features are clearly visible there is also a great use of anonymity with the use of different techniques to make the face not the focal point. This is something that has inspired me for my project making figures anonymous in the People and Place module.

A lot of this is done through the position of the model, or through the use of the clothes, or very much like Horst with shadow and silhouette, toning and positioning.

Some of her work I feel can be almost quite classic, for example the image below is almost “Old Dutch Master” in its look and would not look out-of-place amongst oils in an art gallery, I first thought of Vermeer’s “Girl with the pearl earring” but feel that actually it was even more like some of the work by a more modern Photographer Hendrik Kerstens, I wondered if in fact Sassen had been inspired by some of his work when “experimenting with her own ideas, leading to this final image.

From Vivienne Sassens Book ” In And out of Fashion”

Since 1995, Dutch photographer Hendrik Kerstens has been photographing his daughter, Paula.  Kersten has commented himself that he was inspired by Vermeer but brought his own unique twist to some of the images he produced

All I can say is  loved it, and I have taken so much on-board from seeing this style of photography. Experimentation and being fearless in trying new techniques and angles of view in producing images is what I’ve taking forward into my own work. There I was trying to be taken seriously as someone who produces “good  formal images” and actually I see now that it is more about becoming your own artist.

As Ansel Adams famously said, “You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”

I was left wondering when considering the volume of work that I saw at this particular exhibition, how many images were taken and how many were rejected before arriving at the final selection. Now that would be telling wouldn’t it? I suspect Mr Adams would have famously quoted again: “You may need to go back again and again until you get the shot you want”.

John Gerrard: Solar Reserve at The Thomas Dane Gallery London 2014

Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada), 2014 is shown for the first time outside the US, following its dramatic presentation in Lincoln Centre Plaza by the Public Art Fund in late 2014.  Shown here as a large-scale projection, the work is a painstakingly accurate, virtual portrait of a functioning solar power plant. Ten thousand concentrically arranged monumental mirrors move in real-time according to the sun’s position.  This virtual scene was created with a team of programmers using a sophisticated massive world simulation engine that situated the sun, moon and stars as they appear at the actual Nevada site over the course of a year. As this virtual world rotates on the earth’s axis throughout a 24 hour day, the perspective of the viewer gradually shifts from ground level to satellite view every hour, so that no view is precisely the same at any point during the course of the exhibition.