With lockdown now fully in place, and the Welsh government putting in a place the Five Mile Rule, I am essentially locked in the Rhondda valley for the foreseeable future, and for the most part, at home. During my last meeting with my tutor we discussed the work of James Casabere, and I also wrote about his work in a previous post.
His photographic ovre is made up of images of constructed spaces, models he has built in his studio, inspired by real spaces. It's clear, looking through his portfolio, that his skill as a model builder has improved dramatically, but even in the first place he was able to create highly detailed and impressive models. I fear I do not have the time to build the same level of skill in time for the due date of the FMP, but I did wonder if the nature of the spaces I am interested in might allow me some scope to use lighting and shadow in a way that would hide any lack of skill in model making. With that in mind, my first set of images made from models, have been made from simple card board boxes. I have poked holes in the tops and sides where I placed flash guns to add light, and gelled them using simple red and blue gells that fit closely with the aesthetics of darkrooms.
The spaces I have created here are inspired, like Casabere, by real life spaces. These two in particular I have had in mind for a while. The first being inspired by a club I visited when I was 19. This room was empty when I discovered it but given the type of club I was in the intention was pretty clear. The rooms was a simple concrete room, bare walls with just a bath in the middle. I remember the space seeming incredibly ominous due to the heavy red lighting, so I did the same here. Though I couldn't create a bath, I hope the simple structure in the centre of mine, obscured by back lighting would create a similar effect. I do think as well that by lighting my scene in this way has hidden the texture of the materials, and also made it hard for the viewer to get a sense of scale of perspective, leading to an enigmatic image that could well be a real room. The problem is on close inspection you can of course still see the joins of the car layers, and some of the imprecise cutting on my part.
The image below was my second try, I wanted to create a subject that was a little more complex, so I decided to recreate the St Andrews Cross I had seen in the darkroom I visited before lockdown. My problem with this is that the texture of the card and the cutting show very well that this is not a full scale scene. The lighting, however, combined with the cellophane floor (Inspired by Casaberes works with water), I feel, have worked very well to create visual interest, and in showing these images to peers it was commented that the image is very striking and immediately draws you in.
While I have mentioned while talking about these images about the problems I have faced with making this all look real, I have to also question how real does it need to look. Do I really need to fool the viewer into believing they are looking at a real space? This project is just as much about fantasy as it is reality, so it makes sense that these spaces may have a sense of the unreal about them. The last image here was a test where I tried to use joss sticks to create smoke within the model, this did not work at all as the smoke was too light and dispersed to quickly. The reason i wanted to try adding smoke was to get some more volumetric lighting which would help to add atmosphere to the image,s and would possibly also help to sell the scale buy, once again, obscuring certain details within the image.
There is also the question of, can I complete a compelling project with this style of image making? Am I able to use this process to communicate with my audience? I think the subject matter of some of the images may give some clear narrative indicators to a viewer, in particular subjects like the St Andrews Cross, and so as a series they could work together, but the images need to move beyond simple cardboard structures or, like my final set for the last module, they could all become very similar and any viewer might feel like they were essentially seeing the same image over and over again.
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