the brutal truth
I detest discrimination in all its many hydra-headed forms. I believe in celebrating difference, not using it as a weapon to divide.
Whilst explicit sexism has become just a little less common these days the more insidious danger lies in the implicit. Click on this link to find out more about discrimination in photography - it remains the brutal truth.
this week's photographer
Week 2 and Kate Green introduces us to the work of Miho Kajioka, a very talented young Japanese photographer now living in San Fransisco. Her work is ethereal, calming and fragile. She uses empty space in and around an object to define it.
Miho's photographs have a timeless quality to them, enhanced by the thoughtful use of black and white tones or muted colours.
Not only are the images beautiful, the way they are presented brings a painterly quality to them too. Milo places her subjects in long or wide frames to emphasise the negative space to be found within. She applies origami folds, she uses silver-tone and she stains her pictures with tea.
Her images transcend photography and enter a place where everything is art and art is everything.
the challenge
This week's challenge is to produce two images applying what we've learned about Miho's work. The theme is 'connect to your inner child'.
Here's what I came up with.
what did I do?
The technical bits first. I used a Fuji medium-format camera for its super resolution and image quality. The ISO setting was high and the aperture wide - I was shooting in virtual darkness.
After taking each shot I reviewed the image on the camera's back-screen and used both exposure compensation and film effect to create different images.
Back home I tweaked highlights and shadows, cropped the pictures slightly and applied a vignette and a silver-tone to create a dream-like quality to the images.
Creatively, my focus on connecting to the inner child centred on the mystery and magic of seeing the world in the dark.
As a very small child I remember my parents bundling me and my younger brother into the back seat of the car and driving in the dark in the vain hope he would cease his incessant bawling. I marvelled as the headlights lit up a world which looked so very different in the day.
The choice of a tree to photograph was deliberate. It reminded me of when I was four or five with a hunger to read everything I could lay my hands on. I found Enid Blyton's 'Faraway Tree' stories on our local library and they became a safe sanctuary of my own where I could visit and dream.
what did I learn?
The act of stopping after each shot to check the results on the camera screen made me slow down. It created a natural, gentle-paced rhythm which enabled to think (whether consciously or unconsciously) on a much deeper level.
I'm also intrigued by the way Miho presents her images. In the next few weeks I hope to investigate how I may shape my images using physical means rather than software.
