Quick Project - Portraits of Inanimate Objects

A quick project we did during break on a Lens class. We were tasked with creating portraits of inanimate objects. There were some spare bottles lying around the kitchen in our flat so I used those an made a quick backdrop out of some A1 cartridge paper taped to the wall with duct tape with a slight curve. I used my bedside lamp with the shade removed as a light source. I intended to make them look like traditional family portraits, with everyone having an individual photo and then a group image of everyone together.

John Stezaker

Untitled 1978-9

"John Grenville Stezaker (born 1949), is an English conceptual artist.

John Stezaker attended the Slade School of Art in London, graduating with a Higher Diploma in Fine Art in 1973. In the early 1970s, he was among the first wave of British conceptual artists to react against what was then the predominance of Pop art.

Solo exhibitions have been rare, however, in the mid-2000s, Stezaker's work was rediscovered by the art market; he is now collected by several international collectors and museums"

Barry Underwood

An exerpt from the artist's website, describing his work;

"My artwork examines community and land-use in rural, suburban and urban sites.  I created this series of installations by researching local agricultural, industrial, and recreational land-use. Curiosity about ecological and social history of specific places drives my work.  By revealing the beauty and potential of an ordinary landscape an everyday scene is transformed into a memorable, visual experience.  Each photograph image is a dialogue – the result of my direct encounter with nature and history.  Inspired by land art, landscape photography and painting, as well as cinema, my images are both surreal and familiar.  This tension between the familiar and the surreal gives the images a strange power.   The photographs are documentations of full-scale installations that are built on-site.  I fashion these scenes by immersing myself in a place, instinctively reading the landscape, and then altering the site through LED lights, luminescent material, and other photographic effects.  In the final prints, lights and alterations appear as intrusions, transforming landscapes into abstract images".

Francis Bacon - The Black Triptychs

'In Memory of George Dyer' - 1971

'Triptych - August 1972'

'Triptych - May/June 1973'

"The Black Triptychs are a series of three triptychs painted by the Irish-born English artist Francis Bacon between 1972 and 1974. Bacon admitted that they were created as an exorcism of his sense of loss following the 1972 suicide of his former lover and principal model, George Dyer. Two days before the opening of Bacon's triumphant and career-making retrospective at the Grand Palais, Dyer, then 37, alcoholic, deeply insecure and suffering severe and long-term depression, killed himself with an overdose of drink and barbiturates in a room at the Paris hotel Bacon had allowed him to share during a brief period of reconciliation following years of bitter recrimination".