"Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn't attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don't see." Emmet Gowin
Photographers often construct realities, or dream-like spaces for their figurative subjects to inhabit. Such contemporary photographers are responding to the notion that photography is always a fiction, and not the documentary truth it was once considered to be. Your task is to construct your dreams, memories or histories, thereby expressing something of your identity. The following photographers will help you to generate ideas and techniques -
Mari Mahr constructs half-remembered and half-invented narrative images of her memories and cultural past. Her work combines objects and photographs, public and private, past and present.
Architect CJ Lim is inspired by authors such as Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, and Illustrator Heath Robinson. He creates intricate architectural "drawings" out of photographic fragments.
David Levinthal's photography is at once nostalgic, voyeuristic and poignant. He uses childhood toys to stage events of historical and cultural importance, travelling precariously between imagination and reality.
Duane Michals tried to blur the boundaries between philosophy and photography through his art. He delved into the unconscious mind and asked, what is real and what is imagined? He often grouped his photographs into a narrative structure, the logical nature of which belied his surreal and dreamlike subject matter.
Slinkachu places "little people" around the streets of London, and photographs the glaring scale differential. Although initially comical, his work evokes feelings of alienation, suffering and survival. The figures, so distorted by scale, are inevitably childlike in both their otherworldly and playful qualities.
Happy Researching, Photog Squad!
R Davies
