Went out and about in search of visual source material to feed my final project. There has always been an element of staged in my work which is why I tend to use other people’s photos or remove myself from the construction process to some extent. This interferes with my ideas about the gaze and can lead to stiffness in the imagery as I slice and stitch images together to create hybrid narrative imagery.
So the rules for my ‘photo shoot’ were…

• Figures in blue and red
• Movement
• Conflict or interaction between figures
• Angles
• Push-Pull mentality
• Power
• Outdoor environment
• Believable

Here are some of the outcomes…

Weird angle, sense of pulling away, bodies appear contorted

Frustration in face, grip indicates power and holding against will

Really like the movement in the one – diagonal slope in background and diagonal log coming towards bottom left for structure.

Power again, different levels, bodies seem twisted and cropped

Reflection
I played around with different times on the self timer and different numbers of photos in each series; the best images came from mid series, moving from one ‘action’ to another. Using a tripod worked well as I was able to manipulate the angle of the viewfinder to create landscape and portrait photos, as well as off kilter backgrounds and a sense of thirds in places. It occurred to me that this had become something of a performance, and the photos acting as documentation. It was very difficult to get genuine looking interactions without some minor injuries (:(), but certainly I was able to collect 200+ photos to work with throughout the project. I wonder what this would be like if there was more likeness between the two figures?