In studio with 4800 watt Speedotron unit and 4 flash heads. Part of a series, shot around 600 sheets of 25 or so subjects. more photos here http://www.terminus1525.ca/studio/view/5953
Your welcome james, better work out before you give it a go, carrying all the equipment and film needed by yourself will end up wearing you down. You might need to hire some porters if your taking the gear overseas!
I ended up with 3 overweight check in bags along with 2 overweight carry on bags.
Thanks very much Patrick, found your comments right on the mark and very helpfull, will continue to think of them in the future. Love much of Kouldelka's work also, especially this photograph
Thanks so much for this info, Gerry. It's great you were so inspired by that classic series of photographs. For me, being inspired by someone or something so strongly is a positive advantage... far too much is made of 'originality' in the arts. Some of the greatest performers, artists and writers were deeply indebted to another artist... Bob Dylan's near obsession with Woody Guthrie springs to mind. I see it like this... artists work within a 'tradition', which can be a stylistic tradition, a comositional style, shared subject matter... the list goes on and on. Being influenced by another means one is drawing from the experience and ideas of a line of creative people, which is surely a good thing, so long as one brings a large part of oneself to whatever one is photographing or painting or writing as well. To be obsessed with originality often results in very self-conscious work that often just isn't very good... art for art's sake, but art no one wants to look at or listen to. My main man is Josef Koudelka...
Yes the work is inspired by Avedons book IN THE AMERICAN WEST, some of the compositional ideas are also influenced by this book.
I am a great admirer of Richard Avedon and consider much of his portrait work to be stunning.
Some of the differences between his working technique and mine include, Avedon shot on location in available light and used darkroom masks to get white backgrounds, I shot in studio with 4 flash heads(2 large softboxes not the one moving umbrella of Avedons studio work). Avedon shot with a 360 mm lens, mine was a 300. Avedon credits something like 14 assistants with helping create the book (3 or 4 in the field,plus darkroom people, spotting people, people who helped him find subjects and even 1 person devoted to loading film), I had me myself and I, I had to foot the bill($10,000 +), carry the camera gear, find my subjects and load, develop and process the film, Avedon phototogrphaed over 5 or 6 summers and shot something like 17000 sheets, I shot over 5 weeks and about 600 sheets.
I worked towards getting a different look than Avedon's but also wanted to retain some of the strengths I saw in his photographs. I also tried to photograph a subject that I am passionate about,that I felt was important. The work is definately connected to Avedon but I hope it also has a bit of me in it.
The thing that matters most is the subject and to be able to give these people a voice. It was very important to me for them to be heard and it was the reason I created the work.
thanks for the comments...Patrick I actually did a bunch of compositions with white all around the subject but found that a bit boring. Will try to poste more of those images here so you can get a better feel for the entire project.
This is in the style of the portraits Richard Avedon took for his project 'In The American West', in which he photographed truckers, miners, drifters and waitresses - ordinary folk - against a white backdrop using a large format camera. Personally speaking, I would like there to have been more balance in the composition, with the subjects more centrally placed so that there was white background visible to both sides and above their heads. Particularly, I wish you hadn't cut off the top of the woman on the left's head. But all in all, a strong portrait with a sad undercurrent.
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{K:13393} 9/9/2007
