Exploring work by other photographers and artists

When in my next lesson I looked through clips of previous films and other images to help give me more of an insight to how different photographers or artists worked. We looked at likes of 'Psycho' and 'The Blair witch project' It helped me realise different techniques, especially through film and animation, like composition in Psycho when they film close to her eye and fades out from eye, imagination, and music effects and so on. For me these showed different ways of portraying a certain aspect of mystery through a more horror and occasionally amateur comedy. When looking through the Exam booklet, I looked at the photography page: These questions and quotes caught my attention and helped me question more ideas for my final ideas. 'The camera never lies', or does it? In fact, does the camera ever tell the truth?' This made me question what goes on outside of the frame? 'Pictures can be edited to tell stories. but are they true stories?' 'I 2003 the Los Angeles times dismissed photographer BRIAN WALSKI for altering news pictures of the Iraq war.' Was this wrong for the paper to dismiss it or for him to manipulate it? The reality can remain a mystery! The third bullet point I found just as interesting: 'Simple, everyday subject matter, can be visually transformed into spectacular imagery by the imaginative use of photographic techniques.' The works of UTA BARTH, PATRICK TOSANI AND RICHARD WENTWORTH exemplify this approach. Uta Barth:

Uta Barth was a contemporary photographer working in L.A. She has uses photography, especially in her own artistic projects, experimenting with depths of field, focus and framing to take photographs that are suggestive rather than descriptive. Her interiors and landscapes engage the viewer by chance. Barth's images of interiors, buildings, roads, or natural environment are often out of focus, cropped, and apparently empty from any foreground subject.

Here are some of her work:

I really like this image of Uta's as the simpleness of unfocused and the lighting and colours makes the image feel light and complete although there is a sense of mystery of emptiness.

I like the idea of taking everyday things-- and creating mystery from it through focusing and manipulating. I liked her work so much, I used her images as inspiration when photographing, that I created some of my own work from her ideas: MY IMAGES

Robert Capa:

Another image I looked at was a American Civil War shot - 1864, which consists of 3 images manipulated together.

Robert Capa (War photographer) is responsible for this, he was killed on a landmine, the image is of an unknown soldier, and is still an iconic image, it is still a mystery of whether it was staged or real. Or if he went to stage it but then actually got the shot. There are many stories and is still a mystery today about what actually happened.