Workshop Session

Last Updated on Saturday, 17 July 2010 14:56 Written by Mehmet Ali ANIL Thursday, 04 June 2009 22:54

This is about a video session that me and Dilşad did a while ago. We were in an art studio, and did a couple of shots that we never managed to edit to make a whole short film. The main point was about communication, and we tried to invent abstractions during the process but we ended up shooting more photos than videos for her film class project.

Painted in acrylic during the course of the shootings,  Dilşad went to closet and started to wash her white acyrlic skin off. Covered with circular mirrors, the toilet was a cubicle of reflections, being small, they didn't result in an infinite number of reflections, but created more subtle, interesting  feeling, making one forgot the existence of mirrors up there. Rather, one is easily fooled that a circular contour, or a window is present, evidently fooling one that reflections does not exist.

 So, spotting this weird moment, with some hard times (it was hard to avoid a reflection of my own, and hard for her to remain at that posture) this is the result:

 It was very dark inside, so I had to use a 400 speed film (Couldn't fool my body to force it to a 800 speed film or so), Ilford PAN 400 (I don't know whether this amount of grain is because of that, T-Max has a finer grain I guess. ), with  50mm f1.4.

 I used a polygrade paper with filter 5 (My intention was to give the image as much contrast as It can have, have that 'out of this world' feeling and I wanted the circles to remain floating up in the air.), I guess for other prints, I will use fibre rather than resin coated papers, and stick with T-Max 400 for interior photography.

 I try to avoid overwhelmingly dark-utopic images where rust, cable and images about human metabolism meeting with disgusting machinery is overused. A photograph standing out with its prejudged images and meanings would have just created a"wow how distopic" effect. I also fall into that trap of it quite a lot. Trying to get qualified with that taste also.

What I like about this photo is its circular borders, floating within the composition. They create sleek corpuscles of imagery, maybe I could've experimented by putting other compositions in those circles, though It may have been distracting also.  I also like the hose guiding the eye to the mouth, I guess it is a bit hard to notice the face at first, If there is a certain delay between these two moments of recognition, I guess it *could* stretch the space of this photo to an extra dimension.
 
I don't like my technical work here.I guess I have too much of the whites, and a dirty negative.  Maybe with more light, I could've shot with a deeper field of depth, that would give the face a little more texture. Though I liked the obscurity of the face, I would like the white paint visible on the skin also.

Just thought that making this site bilingual would be unendurable pain.

Cheers.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.