In my research for how to best
take my pictures for my up and coming series, I ran into an artist and
photographer who gave me a totally different perspective of looking at
seemingly ordinary animals, settings and people. Artist Elisa Noguera Lopez
takes shallow, intimate portraits of average subjects that have been
manipulated, through their own gesturing to a fantastically new creature. Her
technique involves bringing her subjects into a controlled, confined space that
she creates using clothed stools or platforms, patterned curtain backdrops and
lighting that focuses on only the subject. Her images allow her subjects to
have their own space but are still shallow and intimate. She would also have to
direct her subject, whether animal or human, to hold these awkward and unique
poses.
It is these poses that suspend the
viewer in Lopez’s surreal plane. Ferrets are curled up to appear as a
mysterious furball like creature that appears, on first glance like nothing
from this world. Women arch their heads back to appear decapitated. The flat,
patterned backdrops are meant to flatten the image and therefore push the
three-dimensionality of the subject forward, towards the viewer. Lopez makes
these creatures into studies on postures, nuances, and textures of fur and skin
that have become so common place that people ignore their beauty.
In the same way, this is what I am
to do with my series of photographs. I wish to capture ordinary landscapes in a
way that displays them as the creatures and monsters that I believe them to be.
Studying Lopez has given me yet another method of achieving such a project that
is both highlighting these “creatures” while also making them interesting to
others. I want to be able to change how people see ordinary objects or settings
just as this artist has done.
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