Focusing my study on portraiture and the vast variety within the genre I have aimed my study on the photographer Rankin and his fashion and beauty side photography. The reason that I have chose this photographer, is because of his great work on many different styles of photography as a whole which I have taken an intrest in. My aim is to create a professional photograph for my final piece in the style of the artists I have chose.
The aim of a portrait is to capture the lightness of a person or subject using the facial expressions as the prodominant feature of the photograph. The object is show the mood, personality and lightness of the subject. Through-out the 20th century photographic portaits were rarely used to take images of people with high social status or wealth. If you had a portait made of yourself it was likely that you had achieved something in life that you would be remember by. Portraits were also used to capture an occassion that happened in the family for example weddings. Portraits were manly painted up until the late 19th century when a man called Richard Beard made the first photography studio therefore creating a modern portrait of a person.
The reason that I picked portrait for the year, is because of its huge variety I really like the fashion side of photography which I hope I show in my work. Fashion photography is everywhere in the media today so finding image to emulate wasn't hard for me. Fashion is also a great passion of mine, as I am at present dealing the fashion retial within my work place. working at next helps me research the fashion trends within fashion this helps me focus more on the fashion media and also helps me know what my audience is looking for. I have a great passion for the beauty side of fashion, looking at the photographic side within the magazine genre, I enjoy analysing images within magazines as this inspires me to analyse my own. Once I had chosen to base my studies on fashion portraiture I started looking at the advertisement side of photography, most of the photographers that I came across which particularly took my eye were, Rankin, David La Chapelle and Annie Leibwortz. As most of there photography is glamorous. The glamour of it is something that I would like to achieve at the end of my project as they are very fashion related.
Looking at some of the photographers that base their studies on fashion for example David La Chapelle I took some of this work and analysed it, taking some of this ideas on board and using it in my own way. Some of his images are suggestive which could be seen as quite sexy which could offend some audiences. As you can see by the image to the right, most of La Chapelle's photographs are based on surrealist situations, as the image that you can see is not an average fashion image, it is a very modern view on today's society. If you look closely at the image you can see that the girl looks like a famous icon; Amy Winehouse. This is relevant to the era that we are in as her attitude and experiences is one that is going on in our society today. I really like this image as it very current and it deals with the emotions of being alone from society and having little. All of David La Chapelle's images are fashionable his influences on my images is quite small but his glamorous photographs have given me the edge that I would like to use in my photographs. 
Another artist that I have looked at has been, Annie Liebowitz. Her photography as of the rest of my artists are very bold and sexy shots. Her photography is very unusual as some of her images doesn't deal with real life, but fantasy. Some of her images look like one of an evil side of some of the famous fairy tales, she has taken some of the ideas from Disney's work and made it her own. As you can see by the image to the right, it is similar to the story of Peter Pan. You can see if you look closely to the image that it looks like a painting, this is because Liebowitz wanted to capture the unlife like story behind the tale. The idea of the story behind the photograph gives us the reason to believee the image looks like a painting. The background out of the window looks like its been painted this is also to show that it is fantascy. Another reason why the photo looks unusual is due to the pixie flying in the room, this also creates the fantascy side to the image. Fashion portrait has been my main focus among the whole project, looking at the artists 'John Rankin Waddell' portfolio, Rankin was born in Scotland in 1966; he is a very well known British portrait and fashion photographer. At the age of twenty one he was studying accountancy at Brighton Polytechnic University were there he realized then that photography was what he wanted to do. Rankin's has worked with a number of different kinds of people from the royals to the homeless. Rankin has also been involved with co-directing music videos; such music videos are Acepella by Kelis plus many more and commercials and feature films with Chris Cottam, including The Lives Of Saints, its won the grand jury prize at the salento international film festival. His work has been admired by many, through his professional portraits.
I used many of Rankins images to emulate in my study, the image below is one of a few photo's that I tried to manipulate. I really like this image as the girl has an innocent look about her. The image is one of my favorite within all of his work. The girl has a scared face which the whiteness of the image also shows the innocence's.
As you can see this is my version of the Rankin's image. The colouring is the same as the real image. The colour of the image also captures the innocence's of the girl. The feeling of the image is a scared side of the girl. I used photoshop to make this image look similar to the one that I was emulating. Photoshop helped me create a professional look of this image. Making the girl appears to seem sad or depressed which was what emotion that I wanted to capture. I believe that the outcome of this image was one of a professional look. Using the black nail varnish compliments the mood of the scene. The dark colouring draws attention to the girl behind the light colouring the contrast of colours in this image is the best possible way of showing the drastic mood within the image.
Once I looked at Rankin's images it gave me the incentive to create some different and funky images of my own. Looking at the different ways in which Rankin presents his images, studying the images and how he used different designs it has lead me to manually cutting different parts of the face away, keeping a black and white image underneath. The contrast between the two colours creates a mood inside the image. Once I decided that I lied the idea of a mixture of the Black and white colour mixing together, I used magazine adverts to do extra work in my book.
For my final piece I was going to take some different photographs of different peoples faces, I did take this Images for this piece, but I was unhappy with how it came out. Thinking about my final piece differently I decided I wanted to take some images of a girl and change the colouring of the photo, and putting the photo's together in a line with different colours. Starting from black and white, adding colour into different sections and final the photo in full colour. I feel that this will add warmth to the images. As you can see for my final images I have put all of the images in a line to show the process from black and white to colour. I really like this final idea as I feel it captures the history of colour within the image itself.
In conclusion I have really enjoyed this year in photography, I really like the independence we have had, with choosing our own genre within photography. I hope you like my coursework as I have really enjoyed making it.
