Skin Imperfections

The human body gains many imperfections, be it through age, a disease, or an accident. These imperfections of the skin are natural signs of age that will effect us at some point in our lives weather we want them to or not. In order to show these imperfections I have based an aspect of my photography completely to imperfections of the skin.

Decay And Rot

To meet the Flaws topic head on I have decided to look closer into decaying and rotting objects. Decay is a natural process that can leave objects broken or literally decomposing, they are then left with flaws and disfigurements. Many of the artists I have researched use elements of decay in their work in order to convey this sense of natural decomposition.

Burnt Photos

Stephen Gill purposely ruined/damaged his photographs in order to convey decay and destruction. He did this in many ways including burying his Polaroid photos and even by putting random pieces of junk  and rubbish inside his camera before he took a photo.

In response to Stephen Gills wacky methods I have taken a series of photographs and have used a lighter to burn holes into them and around the edges. This was inspired by Gills purposeful damaging his photographs.

Texture

As my work for this unit is going to be based solely around Decay, I wanted to be able to practice capturing texture in some decaying objects, as texture is really helpful when expressed in a photograph of decay as it shows detail in the area of decay and helps  the viewer think they are looking at a real object rather than looking at just a photo. 

Here are some of the results I came up with.

This first image of bricks shows texture through the decayed broken brick in the center of the image.

Use of proximity also helped draw the eye towards the decay by centering the area pf focus in the image.

This second image uses texture in the rotten wood and the fungus, showing that this is an old decomposing piece of wood.

Help with only editing levels in Photoshop allowed me to achieve contrast between the lights and dark's of the cracks in the wood.

Texture has been used in this image of a wicker basket by focusing on getting detail in the wood grains in each woven stick. The lines of the grain help make the whole image feel smooth and actually show small imperfections of the wood

For this image of a cushion, I was mostly only focused on capturing texture rather than decay, just as an experiment and practice of capturing texture.

The crack in this brick uses a shallow depth of field to focus the eye primarily on the center of the crack, making it the first place you look at in the image. The minute chips and corrosion of the brick are the areas of texture I wanted to capture.

Here is a contact sheet of some of the other photos I took when looking for texture.