Jock Sturges is a Fine Art Photographer residing in Seattle, Washington but photographing in areas such as California, Ireland and France. Sturges task was a surprise, partly due to how his task doesn’t have strong links with his style of work but was a welcome assignment due to my recent interested in the nude genre. His task details a story of one student’s path to realisation that you can’t always make an image of someone how you want them to be but instead you should make images of who they are without any instruction, such as posing. My task was essentially to emulate this.
Sturges work centres around the ideas of truth, beauty and light. Often asking in his work “what is true?” as the world has seemingly because a place of photoshop and sexualisation, perception is altered by culture and the truth is lost.
©Jock Sturges
What I found challenging during the experimentation stages is that Jock Sturges work is known, even criticised, for its nudity. I am happy to present a certain amount of my body to the camera, just enough to create a visual portrait and styled image, however I am not ready for Sturges level and would have a hard time finding someone to photograph who would be willing. It is this element of nudity in Sturges work that is noticeably absent from his task so I was unsure whether to pursue it further than the visual portrait and image in the style of Sturges (Below). This is something I shall consider in further experimentation. For the image in the style of, I tried to create that appearance of the everyday as well as the truth and perhaps unconventional beauty within it. I have kept it black and white as Sturges works with film and I feel in this case that a lack of colour really adds to the reading of the image, where colour can end up distracting from this. I noted how the ‘see also’ photographers underneath the task, in this case Chris Verene and Bertien Van Manen, used colour and had a different style but really felt like I should stick to Sturges and my own gut instinct.
References:
Photo-Eye Gallery (2016) Jock Sturges [online] available from <http://www.photoeye.com/gallery/forms2/index.cfm?image=1&id=42111&i..>[n/a]
Carys Ellen Fyson 