Destruction + Seung Hwan Oh
Seung Hwan Oh is a photogprahper who streses a heavy basis of physical manipulation in his photos. In his newest
series of works : Impermanence, he demonstrates this very clearly.
In his own words "‘Impermanence’ is about an idea that all the matter including all the life forms collapse in our
spatial-temporal dimension we belong to".
Seung Hwan Oh is a microbiologist who uses bacteria that he cultivates, and watches as they alowly devoure his film.
This would obivously require a background in science and a lab, neither of which I have, however , I believe I can
replicate the effect using different means
In this image, the effect with its multiple coulours and effects could likely be replicated by
using oil or some other substance that could blur the colours of the ink in the image.
This type of image is common in his impermanence seriues.
The destroyed area covers the subject's face. Just enough film is preserved to identify that the subject is a person, but all elements of the person's identity are defaced. The bright colours and swirls give the effect that the film is quickly being englufed by the destruction, with the brighly coloured mass seeming almost animated due to the movements captured on the image. This gives the idea of the image being 'invaded' by the mass as it composes more than half of the frame. The negative space juxtaposed with the bright swirls emphasises this divide and furthers its effect.
The idea of using destruction of the image or film could prove very useful to me, especially to emphasise darker themes. I am interested in burning an image to intentionally damage it in areas to create an effect. I also intend to obscure the film in ways other than destruction by using bright colours and blurs to achieve similar effects.
Here we see his use of destrucion in his "The Ruin Of Pleasure" series. The monochrome filter and unsettling nature of these photos adds a rather eerie effects that i wish to emulate in my work on darker themes. The idea of giving the image the effect of being 'scratched out' is something I had not considered initially, but the outcome is rather haunting and unusual. The heavy use of hard light means that much of the face is veiled in obscurity, alongside the thick matted hair covering a large potion of the subject's face.
The idea of masking the face is important to my theme, it portrays the loss of identity due to mental illness. Seung Hwan Oh's effects in particular interest me as they show a swilrling effect, almost showing motion. In my images I will try to replicate this to show the inner conflict with the illness to maintain your identity.
Below are my experiments with physically manipulating an image to creeate an effect similar to that of Seung Hwan Oh.
David Mack
David Mack uses a wide array of colours and swirling effects with paint to create a unique style that interests me. His subjects all seem to fade into the background with the paint.
I wish to replicate his use of colour and paint in my own images, and will attempt to experiment in methods to encapsulate these aspects of his work in my own. I wish to use darker colours as bright colours tend to connotate happy and 'brighter emotions', so I may use darker colours to represent the more negative emotions like sadness or frustration, with more focus on colours like blue and its connection to the idea of depression and the morose.
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Paint
I have decided to ttempt to use acryllic paint as it sticks to photographs better than other types of paint. I am attempting to use paint to follow the effects of David Mack using the elaborate mixtures of colours and swirls. However, unlike Mack, I will use it to obscure the face, rather than to simply work as a background. I hope that this will give me an insight into how to portray mental illness and the destruction of identity that comes with it.
THis image was my first attempt. I placed a line of acrylic red and blue paint to the left of the image and used a squeegee to drag it accross the face. The effect was interesting as it had a translucent effect, allowing somevisibility to the face beneath the paint. Though this effect was interesting, I felt it did not meet the style of Seung Hwan Oh, who is the main influence on my work.
I decided to use a heavier layer of paint and use the tip of the squeegee aswell as a small brush to smirl the paint. I used mutliple layers to create a heavier effect. However, though I attempted to use different colours, the layering effect made the red the dominant part of the image, even though I used both purple and blue as well. Yet this image serves as a reminder to spread my colours more diversely in future.
I decided to try using a squeegee again to spread the paint over the image. I used a mixture of tones from my complimentary colour mixing. I spread these over a white strip to bring out light and dark tones in the streak to witness the result.
The outcome was interesting and obscured the face well. Although as its own technique it produced and itneresting result, it does not fit the theme of seung hwan oh as the rather cubed effect of the paint differs greatly with the swirls and spurratic nature of the "impermenance" series. However, perhapse the use of a small brush to spread the paint may produce a better result. Although the colours do look more jarring as the have not blended to gether particularly well, they have avoided dissapearing under one dominant colour like the red in my previous experiment, which is a great improvement.
Paper Marbling
Paper marbling is often used to create interesting patterns and transfer them to paper.
It entails taking a bath of water and dropping oil based paints on to it. The oil makes the paint sit on the water surface and makes it easy to transfer to the paper.
I will attempt to apply this to part of my image to create a similar effect to the impermanence series. I hope to discern how to properly use this by attempting to apply it to my image in different ways such as printing on to marbled paper, applying it to the image directly or a combination of the two.
*Note that this image is not my own, but is simply to represent what can be achieved through marbling
I attempted to marble directly onto my image, however, my tray was too small for A4 paper, and so I had to press different parts of my image in at the same time.
My marbling tray, with the inks still in place
For some reason, as with the acryllic, the red was overpowering in the image. The intricate swirls and patterns all become dark and indistinct, losing the effect that I intended.
I believe that taking a photo of marbled paper and using photoshop to edit it into and image is my best course of action to create my desired effect.
I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.In this image I tried to marble on to photo paper with no image on. I found that I had unwittingly saturated colours, leading to the thick, heavy blots of inc that encompass a large ammount of the image. This is a simple error that I now know to avoid.
This image was more to the effect that I intended. Though I again suffered from the problem of having to press individual parts of the image into the tray as it was too small. I will crop out the blank space and try to incorporate the oily effect that it has captured into another image.
I briefly experimented with burning images. I used a white underlay so that the actual effect of the burning was easy to spot so that I could clearly show how the image had been burned. Though this effect was interesting and did remove the identity somewhat, it did not fit Seung Hwan Oh's work and is not my desired direction for my work, therefore I will not be using this in future.