Film: inspired film artist

Throughout the past 2 weeks, I have been assigned to write about two artist: Irving Penn and Imogen Cunningham. After writing my research essay, I had to create a collage inspired by one or both of the artist. I chose to do mainly Irving Penn’s model portraits, with a little of Imogen Cunningham’s plant life. When creating this I cut out photos of well known celebrities and models from magazines like Elle and Cosmopolitan, and the images of the plants I took out of a furniture catalogue. I decided to do a portrait and model based collage because I prefer Penn’s images compared to Imogen’s. But, unlike Penn’s I took a little of Imogen’s aspects and made the aperture lower making the image look dark and gloomy.

In my images I used techniques like low key lighting and sharp focus. When I first started using the test strips the aperture was really low making the image really dark when I went to develop it. So, the next time I went to the dark room I turned up the aperture slightly so the image was a little more clear. The entire process took about 3- 30 minute periods.

In my collage there isn’t much of a story besides choosing Penn’s style because of his high attention to detail. The project relates to my life because I am interested in portrait photography and when developing the image I liked to see the portraits become dark rather than light like the rest of the images I have ever created. If my image could be stronger I would try to do better job at laying the print evenly when developing the image, because I made about 4 images that all failed due to it not being even in the developer bath or having the image be too dark.