INFLUENCES IN TERMS OF CULTURAL STYLINGS

As you can probably tell by now after looking at most of my blog one thing that inpsires me heavily is music, but it is not just the music itself that is an inspiration it is the culture and sense of always looking for new and exciting artists. There are a number of magazines that cover the culture that surrounds most genres of music. I find these magazines a good way staying on top of new cultural movements, fashion, music, certain products and also styles of photography that are popular. As you can imagine these magazines are heavily imaged based and it is important for these images to come across fresh and exciting so almost always the imagery will be extremely eye catching and up to date.
With the introduction of such things as Myspace, Facebook, and Blogs making it very easy to find out a lot about people very fast, i think there is a need for imagery to be a lot more true to what is actually happening there and then. As a result i feel there is a huge decrease in the demand for very staged and heavily edited images within this section of modern culture of which i am interested in at this moment in time. There will however have been some digital based post production to most of these images all be it just minor contrast and colour changes and perhaps some cropping. All though these images may not have been heavily edited in the post production stages all these magazines and blogs are created on computers and the positioning on the page and the text and other images that surround them will have an effect on their meaning and in my opinion could be easily be classed as a form of digital post production.

Here are some examples of Magazines, Blogs and Websites that i think push forward these cultures through their imagery.

VICE MAGAZINE


This magazine has been around for a long time now and is still at the forefront of all modern culture, and is also very well known for having some of the worlds top photographers appear in it. Sections like Do's and Dont's have the sort of imagery i have been talking about.



What interests me about these images is the way they leave me asking questions who are these people, what do they do, where did they get that t-shirt from and so on. I find images like these just as interesting or maybe even more interesting than images by photographers such as Rankin and Martin Parr.

Another Magazine, quite similar to Vice is a magazine called Shut, that actualy seems to have disapeared as of late, non the less there are some nice images in there.





As you can see from these images they are all pretty raw, no exterior lighting and no obvious editing, it's mainly just people in the streets or at party's who happen to be well dressed and the magazines use them as models. I especially like the ones taken on polaroid shown below.





BLOGS;

http://fluokids.blogspot.com/

This blog here is primarily a music blog where people put music for you to download but also has some nice imagery related to fashion and hosts a few ads for other realted blogs and sites. It's mainly in french but you should be able to get an idea of what is going on. I feel the images on this blog, all be it of attractive girls are in a similar vien to those of mine for this project, colour, lighting and for use of a better word, vibe.

WEBSITES

http://www.berangereclaire.com/viewmodel.php?idm=FKARGR#top

This next one i used in my studio lighting project but i think it is also relevent to this project in terms of style. It's also in French!

http://www.thecobrasnake.com/partyphotos.html

Same applies to this one but it's in English.

http://store.americanapparel.net/women-sweatshirts---jackets.html

The american apparel site is a good example of a company using very basic photos in the style i have been talking about to sell their products.

http://www.terryrichardson.com/Start.html

After having recently bought a t-shirt from uniqlo because it had a cool looking guy on it, i found out that cool looking guy was Terry Richardson a world class photographer. I soon looked him up on the internet and was pleasantly surpprised to find that his work is actually really good. A lot of his photos are a similar style to that of which i have been talking about just of quite high profile people.

One more thing i would like to show you is this flyer i found at snappy snaps for a local artist named Claire Blundell Jones who is doing a performance piece in and around leeds called 'Kissing II'. Where nine couples will emerge in public spaces, group in close formation according to a prearranged plan, kiss each other ten minutes, and then disperse. The actual performance isn't anything to do with my project but the flyer is strangely similar to mine.