Did you know, Shinigami’s like Apples?
Figure Ground relationships co-morbid with color and shape
For this figure ground experiment, the set was my own living room. The figures in the shoot were myself and my friend Makayla. The lighting was the biggest challenge to overcome, as I wanted to project a crimson light onto the figures using a red lightbulb. This proposed several challenges, because photographing under low lighting conditions is not my specialty. My partner on this shoot, helped me figure out the logistics of lighting. We settled on a floor sunlight lamp, the overhead warm light of the room, and the studio standing light was the red bulb. I then had to play with the camera settings and figure out the best shutter speed and ISO settings for the environment. Eventually I was able to achieve a couple good shots with my setting and color scheme
Color is an important part of my overall art practice and using my living room with a red painted wall, and sepia color scheme was an ideal setting. Red is the dominant color in the photo “Shinigami” and “Arachne”. For the key piece of this shoot, yellow became the dominant color for the image “Arachne and Lilith”. Black is also an important color because it projects an aura of mystery and femininity across the three prints. Of course, with the color scheme and face painting, there is the implication of horror and the macabre.
As for questioning the relationships between figure and ground, I believe these three images use color and shape to confuse the viewer. My only discomfort with these prints is that the blacks didn’t look black enough to add to that effect. I will likely fix this by painting India ink on top of these matte prints. Unfortunately, I have a focused artistic lens of creating photographs for the purpose of references for painting. I prefer painting over photography simply because I can change the shapes and textures of the original in a way, I feel I cannot achieve through photoshop.
As for my adjustments in photoshop and lightroom, I recognize I went a little overboard with the editing. My artistic way in how I edited these photos is what carries over into my painting practice. I intentionally distort the colors and shapes to simplify it in a way that I can extract that idea and apply it in paint. This was essentially my creative approach to the assignment. I did a physical shoot to get the stage, props, and figures I wanted. I used the lighting equipment to achieve the red effect that I desired and that worked; however, I wanted to intensify the sepia and red tones to the point of absolute color dominance. I believe the photos “Shinigami” and “Arachne and Lilith” were absolutely elevated by increasing the saturation and color intensity in these prints. I will likely paint these two photos.
Conceptually, the project began with just me and my friend putting on makeup. She chose a clown like look with dark eye makeup; and I chose a spiderweb face paint with and enlarged ghastly smile and a plastic spider glued to my forehead. We took some practice photos outside at night with the flash on, and they weren’t bad, and they came out spooky in their own way. There is a series of images of my crawling up the stairs in a creepy way, that I had hoped to turn into a GIF but didn’t have much luck with that. It wouldn’t have worked for this assignment either because there is a clear distinction between the figure and ground.
After the practice outdoor shoot, we picked up my living room and set the stage with some lighting. After many test shots, we became comfortable enough to get some quality photos done. From start to finish the photoshoot was probably about 4 hours, in addition I edited and combed through the large number of images. That process took about 2 hours. Then I fought with my Canon photo printer to achieve small test images. I chose to invest significant effort into this assignment, to make up for missing the in-class time. Also understanding it was a collaborative assignment, I chose to work with my friend who Is a fiber major and loves to model.
The overarching theme of this shoot is “Things that go bump in the night”. A fear of spiders and a fear of demons is represented using color and signifiers. The story of Arachne is important to this theme.
“ARAKHNE (Arachne) was a prideful girl of Kolophon (Colophon) in Lydia who once dared challenge the goddess Athena to a weaving contest. Athena worked her loom to depict the gods seated in their glory upon high thrones while Arakhne mocked them with a scene of animal-shaped deities trysting with mortal girls. The goddess was enraged at her impiety and beat the girl with a shuttle, driving Arakhne to hang herself in despair. The dangling maiden was then fittingly transformed into a spider (Greek arakhnês).”
Now on the note of Shinigami, that has its own rich mythological history.
“The word “Shinigami” is made from two other Japanese words: “shi” and “kami”. These literally mean “death” and “god”. In Japanese mythology, the world is filled with kami of various sorts. Everything in the world has a spirit that governs it. There are kami of the sky, kami of the rivers, kami of luck and, of course, kami of death. These are the Shinigami. The death spirit’s job is to invite mortal humans to death, which sounds much more polite than having your soul reaped by a tall skeleton in a robe. However, just which kami are true Shinigami is not always clear.”
My takeaway from this assignment, is that I have a good understanding of figure ground relationships, as well as utilizing color, space and shape in a photographic shoot. I did have a hard time with lighting and camera usage; however I do feel like I eventually achieved the right look through trial and error. I’m also uncertain how to get better quality prints by adjusting the print settings on my Canon photo printer. So these will be important challenges to consider for my next project. Overall, I am happy with the results of this shoot.
