Category: Appropiation

 

Inspired by a story I heard on a podcast, I stood away from forming any idea as detailed and gruesome as Aled Pardee’s work, but still wanted to stick to the idea of taking something ‘disgusting’ and making it look attractive. Roadkill or the death of wild animals, be them small or large, is commonly seen amongst peoples everyday life, and is never a nice sight to see. On finding the original picture, I took the bird’s body from the boring and undignified place of its passing and gave it new life (metaphorically speaking of course). The blank background emphasises the bright colours, which contrast the lifeless object and its bland colours.

Again, I took to social media to find an image and change its meaning. My sisters partner shared this photo on his Facebook page joking he wanted to look ‘edgy’ and ‘free spirited’, an expression that made me laugh. To me, this image made him look lost. On discovering the two different meanings taken from the image, I chose to edit the photo to make it seem less ‘free’, and began cluttering the area surrounding the man and separating him from the open space. To do this, I created barriers between him and the sea, and also altered the colour, making him seem faded and unclear, yet keeping the open sea rather obvious and open. Confining the design to one part of the image, rather than covering the entirety, adds to the idea of this figure being lost and feeling separated from the wide open space left around him.

 

In order to gain my best work, I chose to start with something I was interested in. When I think of photography, I struggle to pinpoint one category, so instead I dove onto social media and saved images I found the most common type of photos I could find. On scrolling my Facebook feed, the most repetitive images were of animals and scenery.

Photography only impacts my life when It comes to documenting events with family, friends and pets. Choosing my first photo was rather easy. The original photo was taken by a family member towards the beginning of last year, and shows my dog enjoying a walk around a local field. In and before the photo, Tim was watching birds fly past in the distance, and seemed to be enjoying the wind and all the different smells. The photo was captioned by my cousin “Bird Watching”.

In previous work, I had attempted to fine tune my ability to alter the colour in Adobe software, giving me the idea of how dogs see the world in different colour. As studies show they are unable to see the colour red, dogs are restricted to only seeing blues, yellows, and the grayscale. With this in mind, the image didn’t seem to show this. Even without certain colours and understanding, Tim still enjoys observing the scenery around him, using his other senses to enhance his experience further than my own, where we would have thought the opposite. Having Tim look and stand through the four colours dogs ‘can’ see represents how different a world can be to them, but this does not make it any less interesting.

For my first two images, I was mainly inspired by my own interests and preferences. As mentioned in their specific posts, I took their images from social media and took them away from their owners perspective, and gave them a new meaning. As for the design, I was highly inspired by previous work I had both created and researched. One image that gave me the idea of mixing photography with geometric shapes was the above edit I found online whilst scrolling through generic tumblr tags. In the image, Different parts of the image have been manipulated and rearranged into a pattern of triangular shapes, an effect I found was complimented mainly by the usage of thin lines and central focus.

With every intention of sticking to a geometric theme, I began to research into artists who took one thing and turned it into something else, as this was obviously rather fitting to the brief. A favourite artist of mine named Alex Pardee is famous for transforming disgusting concepts into beautiful and colourful pieces of art. The idea of using things such as the slitting of a mans throat or a flesh like creature taking over a human skull would never have been planted into my mind as a way to create an attractive piece, however bright colours and detailed shading adds a sadistic form of attraction, inspiring me to take something rather morbid and make it attractive.