Fashion Evaluation
What is cloning? Reproductive cloning is a technology used to generate an animal that has the same nuclear DNA as another currently or previously existing animal.
For the fashion brief my world event was to Cloning, I chose this as I feel that fashion is in some way related to this as it is always being regurgitated and brought back in to fashion at some point. For example this winter military style coats were all the rage but back in the 1920s these where fashion due to the war, thick duffel jackets were made out of heavy blankets due to lack of material and the style mimicked from that of the army men.
Fashion can be about individuality but for the masses it is about following the trend.
For the brief I initially didn't want to concentrate on any particular era in fashion, like the 60s, although this did change later on into my work and I based some of the photoshoots on the teddy boy period of the 50s and punk era of the 80s. For me i saw my work as more about experimentation, I wanted to seeing how I could in-effect 'clone' the people I was photographing.
My experimentation was initially done through film creating double exposures using a Hasselblad, the technique was hard to master but the effects I got from it were some of my favourite work. Images had a ghostly effect to them, which could of been interpretated as the past and present and how I see fashion, something that is always coming back round again. My next experiment was then digital manipulation, which was easier to achieve, although the image had impact it was something which is seen quite often and in some images did make them look a little over processed. Another experiment I also tried was again with film but rather that double exposures I wanted to use multiple negatives from the film to create one image. This could be done in various ways, one being that you exposed your photo paper to first image and then exposed your second image, and the other was to use both negs at the same time, I did experiment with both techniques and examples from this can be found in my sketch book. Lastly I wanted to show the effect of human 'cloning' and my interpretation of this was to use two models who were very similar looking, my hopes, to create the effect of twins.
Final Images
My final 8 images for fashion have been chosen as although visually they seem to fit my world event the least, when you look more closely at the images you will see that they represent fashion and other eras throughtout the most.
The suit in the images is what i have used to represent cloning, its a modern day take on the 50's Teddy Boy suit, backing up what i say about fashion being regurgitated, and the ties themselves represent each era in fashion, starting at 1920s - 1980s and how things change even with small accessories.
My technical abilities still need to be worked on, but overall i feel the compostition and poses are strong, and the images show influence from other photographers, Ben Watts Teddy Boy portraits. Editing was carried out in photoshop as i wanted to try an alternative style.
