National Portrait Gallery

We visited The National Portrait Gallery in London to take a look around their photography exhibition. We were asked to pick out three images that were the most interesting, represented something and stood out the most to us.

Here are the images that I liked the best:

The Obamas by Gillian Laub, December 2014

“This portrait of was an unpublished pose from a commissioned sitting for People magazine at the Marine Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, Washington DC”

Many things speak out to me when looking at the picture of President Barack Obama and The First Lady Michelle Obama. One of many things is how strong and dependent they look by the way that they are standing there. Their heads are held high as if everyone and everything else is beneath them. The power they have upon everyone else is vigorous.  However, The way Michelle Obama has her arm around Barack Obama shows how much love and support she has for him vice versa. The black background makes the couple stand out the most and makes you automatically drawn to them.

Five Girls by David Stewart, 2014

“His photograph Five Girls 2014 is of his daughter and her friends, and mirrors a photograph he took of them seven years ago when they were about to start their GCSEs.”

This photo was one of the first that stood out to me, the variation of colour due to clothes, hair, skin colour and objects surrounding the girls makes it interesting to look at.

Tom By Sophie Harris-Taylor, 2015

“Sophie Harris-Taylor’s glacial portrait of a male dancer from the Rambert Ballet School is a quiet masterpiece.”

The main thing that stands out the most to me in the photo is the boy’s facial features. They’re darker than anything else in this pictures as everything else is pale such as his skin colour, background and clothing. The picture is from a project called first position, my take from this project is that the boy’s first position” is when they first start a dance, I can tell it may be a dance judging from his clothing.

 

Rut Blees Luxemburg Research

Rut Blees Luxemburg is a German photographer who was born in 1967. She has become a tutor at the Royal College of Art which is a public research university in London She likes to capture landscapes, particularly photos that are taken at night. She has a love for night-time landscapes of the city, especially when being able to capture the movement of the bright lights. When shooting, she likes to play around with the shutter speed, preferably using a long shutter speed to capture the light from surrounding buildings or streetlights.  Some of Luxemburg’s work was used for various occasions such as the London Underground in 2007 and Bloc Party’s Album ‘A Weekend in the City’ cover in 2007.

When studying Luxemburg’s photos, I find that when taken at night they always have an orange or yellow tint, this is due to the streetlights or surrounding lights coming from the buildings. As well as capturing the landscape, within that she manages to capture shadows because of the lights and larg e objects in front of them. Some of the photos are wet from where it had been raining throughout the day; this also allows the light from the streetlights to reflect from them, another reason to acknowledge the fact she is using artificial lighting, not natural lighting. By taking the photos at night it gives it a negative effect however because of the lights used it gives it quite a positive effect. The atmosphere the photos give is quite eerie due to harsh lighting, sharp buildings and roads.

I am going to do a Rut Blees Luxemburg inspired shoot, in order to do this I need to wait until it is dark outside and the street lights come on. I want to capture the orange tinge in the photos and have the picture focus on an object just like Luxemburg’s focuses on a buildings, shadows or roads etc. The objects need to be sharp so that the orange tinting of the street lights softens the picture up. I need to incorporate line into my work, therefore I am going to take photos by a road, this will give sharp lines giving an in depth perspective as well as the surrounding street lights giving a soft effect.