Following on from exercise 4.4 Ex Niliho and with the view to a potential full-blown project for assignment 4. I have Google searched Oranges.
Except for the logo for Orange mobile, the shots are very dull, product shots, taken in controlled lighting – probably a light tent. There is very little in the way of what we would consider creativity to the shots; they are simplify designed to show the orange to it best in marketing materials.
There is various way I guess to shoot and orange that is not a product shot we can make it more of an abstract image, so we the viewer is questioning what it is, maybe an extreme close-up on the skin to show the texture of the peel.
The quotation from Haas in the course notes regarding looking at an apple trying to see it as the first ever apple, say to me if we are looking at the familiar we cannot help to be influenced by what as happened before. Didn’t Picasso once say “good artists borrow, great artist steal.”
Looking at Haas work, I was most drawn to the Bullfighting images and other sports images, particularly of swimmers at the 1984 Olympic where he has used extreme motion blur as a way of showing the familiar in an unfamiliar way. Yes, we try to capture the sense of motion or power in our sports shot but not usually to this degree. Unfortunately as inspiring as these are they are not in my mind appropriate for an orange.
Bill Brandt also said that he allowed the camera to capture what the camera saw, without interfering too much, as opposed to shooting what he saw. This is the influence of his surrealist mentors such as Man Ray; however, I have to confess I did quite understand this statement for quite some time. I was only looking at Brandt’s nudes do I begin to he how is is is just capturing how he light is falling off the soft and complex shape of the human body. To me, some of Brandt’s nude images remind me of sculpture by Henry Moore.
There was Henry Moore in Leeds my the art gallery for most of the time I was growing up. In fact, it might still be there today, I have been left Leeds 17 years, but the more I looked at it and aged I saw it more shape in it particularly how it changed in light. This what I see in Brandt some of Brandt’s nudes such as here
The following shots were taken using a one light source, a simple pocket torch, to try to produce a set of images that show the shape and form of the orange with immediately revealing it as an orange. In a similar way that a nude is lit. Orange peel often reminds me of skin, hence where the idea came from.
These images we shot as an extension to me work on exercise 4.4, to get a basis for the full assignment. While, I like the shots although they do need further work – if they are to go forward as an assignment. My idea was to shoot the orange as a celestial body and use the orange to illustrate how light falls on a subject as opposed to how the object looks from an aesthetic point of view.