Fashion Designer Influence - John Galliano

Another designer of breathtaking, outrageous and different fashion is John Galliano, I love the extravagance and the gothic tones to his designs of true beauty.


He has been quoted as identifying his love of theatre and femininity as central to his creations – “my role is to seduce” he has said and went as far as recreating some of Dior’s period clothing for Madonna in the film Evita. Galliano has reputedly cited Charlize Theron as a muse and has been creating couture dresses for her to wear to formal red carpet events such as the Academy Awards and the Golden Globe Awards.

She is also part of the ad campaign for Dior’s “J’Adore” perfume, while Riley Keough, granddaughter of Elvis Presley, fronts his “Miss Dior Cherie” perfume, and Kate Moss, in photographs by Nick Knight, his ready-to-wear campaigns as well as modelling in both couture and ready-to-wear shows. His couture shows have featured other elite couture models of the last two decades - Erin O’Connor, Alek Wek, Linda Evangelista, and Karen Mulder. Hollywood film stars Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman have frequently worn dresses created by him to the Academy Awards.

Private clientele for couture collections include Daphne Guinness, Princess Diana of Wales. Currently, between his own label and Dior, Galliano produces six couture and ready-to-wear collections a year and a new mid-season range under his own name “G Galliano”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Galliano

Fashion Designer Influence - Alexander Mc Queen

When choosing the fashion for the shoot I looked at Alexander Mcqueen as his designs are outrageous, striking and very beautiful and his clothes mirror exactly what I want to accomplish in my photos. I like how his outfits can look very feminine and beautiful, but yet very powerful.

His fashion shows are also a great inspiration, he creates theatrical worlds in which he showcases his designs. I love the drama and how fierce both his catwalk shows are and his clothing, which is defiantly similar to what I want to use for my photo shoot. Some of his outfits are very feminine pretty and others weird and wonderful.


ALEXANDER MCQUEEN burst onto the fashion stage in 1992, courting controversy as headlines hailed him as the new enfant terrible. Though contentious and frequently misunderstood, he established the fashion label that is now internationally acclaimed and coveted without compromising his approach.

From the start of his career McQueen has both shocked and delighted his audience with raw presentations often depicting bleak history and anarchic politics. These shock tactics began in dimly-lit warehouses away from the staid environment of the London Fashion Week tents. His autumn/winter 1995 catwalk show in particular captured the headlines. Entitled Highland Rape, the collection featured dishevelled and battered-looking models in torn clothing.

It was McQueen’s comment on the rape of the Highlands at the hands of the British; interpreted by others as a perverse and misogynistic celebration of the sexual violation of women. His spring/summer 1997 collection, La Poupee, featured a black model whose movements were restrained by a metal cage attached to her limbs, hit the headlines again. Inspired by the German puppet-master Hans Bellmer, the rusty contraption was designed to evoke a marionette; inevitably, again, some of the press saw bondage, slavery and the subordination of women.

McQueen’s flair for showmanship has led him to be celebrated as much for outrageous theatricality as for the unique combination of aggressive tailoring and lyrical romanticism in his clothes. As the stature of the McQueen name grew, so did the twice-yearly spectacle. His weird and whimsical catwalk narratives have included models encircled in flames, drenched in rainstorms or spun like music-box dolls on revolving circles in the floor.

The shows are inspired by cult films by Stanley Kubrick, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfred Hitchock, or by the dark photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin. It Witkin’s work which inspired McQueen’s spring/summer 2001 show. Models staggered around, trapped in a mirrored box that obscured their view of the audience. Their bandaged heads and confused expressions evoked disease both physical and psychological. The spectacle ended as the walls of the glass box shattered to the floor to reveal an obese model wearing nothing but a gas mask, surrounded by hundreds of moths.

None of these sensational spectacles has eclipsed the substance of McQueen’s design. The avant-garde narrative rhetoric belied a very traditional training in bespoke tailoring on London’s famous Savile Row.

Lee Alexander McQueen was born in the East End of London on March 17th 1969, the youngest of six children; his father a taxi driver, his mother a social history teacher. From an early age he knew he wanted to be a designer and he spent his formative years at Rokeby, the local boys’ comprehensive school, drawing and reading books on fashion.

He left school at the age of 16 with a single O-Level and worked for a time clearing glasses in his uncle’s pub. He completed his A-Level in Art at night-school at West Hampton Technical College before being offered an apprenticeship at the revered Savile Row tailors Anderson & Shepherd. Here he learnt the intricacies of cutting jackets before moving up the street to Gieves & Hawkes, (founded in the 19th century as a military outfitter but now a successful menswear brand) to apply and develop these skills to trousers.

It was here that that the anti-establishment McQueen legend began, when he famously scrawled obscenities in tailor’s chalk in the inner-lining of a jacket destined for the heir to the throne, Prince Charles.

He moved to the theatrical costumiers Angels & Bermans to work on productions for big musical shows such like Les Miserables, while continuing to master the skills of pattern-cutting – including techniques from earlier centuries that are evident in his work today. He then went to work for London-based designer Koji Tatsuno, then backed by Yohji Yamamoto, before moving to Milan to work with his hero, Romeo Gigli.

This was in the late 1980s when Gigli was still enjoying the media hyperbole that had propelled him into the limelight. McQueen was undoubtedly influenced by the power of the press machine he witnessed in Milan, and convinced of its contribution to a designer’s success.

In 1990, when Gigli separated from his friends and business partners Donato Maiano and Carla Sozzani, McQueen returned to London where he sought work teaching pattern-cutting at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design. Instead of a job, he was offered a place on the MA design course, his drive and impressive curriculum vitae making up for his lack of formal qualifications. With a loan from his Aunt Renée he completed his MA in 1992 and sold his graduate collection to the influential stylist Isabella Blow who went on to become his muse, patron and unofficial public relations agent.

McQueen immediately established his own label with a small collection presented at the Bluebird Garage on the King’s Road, Chelsea. It was here that his signature “bumsters” – jeans cut just above the pubic bone to reveal the cleft of the buttocks behind – made their first appearance. The brutally sharp styling of his collections could not obscure their sublime craftsmanship, historical cut and exquisite detailing. Impeccably tailored suits are softened with fine lace, while skin-tight leather is unashamedly sexual and subversive.

In October 1996, at the age of 27 and having produced only eight collections, McQueen was appointed Designer-in-Chief at Givenchy in Paris, replacing John Galliano, who went to sister label Christian Dior. Givenchy brought the backing of luxury conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy and enabled McQueen to continue developing his own label. A turbulent four-and-a-half years at Givenchy began with disappointing reviews of his first Haute Couture collection in 1997. Fond journalists, mostly French, demanded that McQueen’s uncompromising avant-garde designs be softened to meet for the house whose most famous muse was Audrey Hepburn.

In 2001 McQueen again made the headlines with the controversial move of selling a 51 percent share of his label to the rival Gucci Group. Their financial backing and insightful decision to encourage rather than suppress McQueen’s talents made the label an international brand. Today, McQueen has flagship stores in New York, Milan, London and LA; an accessories collection a menswear collection; and eye wear.

He has been named British Fashion Designer of the Year four times, in 1996, 1997, 2001 and 2003. In 2003 he was awarded International Designer of the Year by The Council of Fashion Designers of America and in the same month he was honoured as a Most Excellent Commander of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to the British fashion industry and in 2004 McQueen was awarded British Menswear Designer of the Year.

http://designmuseum.org/design/alexander-mcqueen

Artist Influence - Rosseti

I love the beauty of Rossetti’s paintings, and although I want my images to have a dark quality I very much want to use models with qualities from Rossetti’s painting, to create a beauty that the person will find exquisite, elegant, alluring and graceful.

I want a strong contrast between the romance and beauty of the model and the darkness of the themes in the images.


The poet, painter, and designer Dante Gabriel Rossetti, b. Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, May 12, 1828, d. Apr. 9, 1882, was a cofounder of the PRE-RAPHAELITES, a group of English painters and poets who hoped to bring to their art the richness and purity of the medieval period. The son of the exiled Italian patriot and scholar Gabriele Rossetti and a brother of the poet Christina Rossetti, Dante showed literary talent early, winning acclaim for his poem The Blessed Damozel (1847) before he was 20 years old. As a student at the Royal Academy Antique School (1845-47), he met William Holman Hunt and John Millais, with whom he launched the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848.

Rossetti’s first Pre-Raphaelite paintings in oils, based on religious themes and with elements of mystical symbolism, were The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850), both in the Tate Gallery, London. Although he won support from John Ruskin, criticism of his paintings caused him to withdraw from public exhibitions and turn to watercolours, which could be sold privately. Subjects taken from Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nuova and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur inspired his art in the 1850s. His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired his new friends of this time, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.

Romantic love was Rossetti’s main theme in both poetry and painting. Elizabeth Siddal, whom he married in 1860, was the subject of many fine drawings, and his memory of her after she died (1862) is implicit in the Beata Beatrix (1863; Tate Gallery, London). Toward the end of his life, Rossetti sank into a morbid state, possibly induced by his disinterment (1869) of the manuscript poems he had buried with his wife and by savage critical attacks on his poetry. He spent his last years as an invalid recluse.

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/rossetti/

Artist Influence - H.R Giger

I first saw Giger’s art work as a teenager and I have always been inspired by his dark surreal dream worlds. I am using his images to inspire this project as they are dark, disturbing, uncomfortable, he also deals with religious imagery and themes of birth, death and life after death.


Giger got his start with small ink drawings before progressing to oil paintings. For most of his career, Giger has worked predominantly in airbrush, creating monochromatic canvasses depicting surreal, nightmarish dreams capes. However, he has now largely abandoned large airbrush works in favour of works with pastels, markers or ink.

His most distinctive stylistic innovation is that of a representation of human bodies and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship, described as “biomechanical”. His paintings often display fetishistic sexual imagery. His main influences were painters Ernst Fuchs and Salvador Dalí. He met Salvador Dalí, to whom he was introduced by painter Robert Venosa. He was also a personal friend of Timothy Leary.

Giger is perhaps the best-known sufferer of night terrors and his paintings are all to some extent inspired by his experiences with that particular sleep disorder. He studied interior and industrial design at the School of Commercial Art in Zurich (from 1962 to 1970) and made his first paintings as a means of art therapy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._R._Giger

Artist Influence - Salvador Dali

I have liked the imagination of Salvador Dali’s images for years, I like the way he create dream worlds and uses surrealism to create strange worlds beyond the imagination. I like his placement of things that wouldn’t normally go together to make the viewer thing about what they mean.

I defiantly intend to place weird things together in my images as this will allow the person looking at the images to try and work out what it means.


Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and designer. After passing through phases of Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting, he joined the Surrealists in 1929 and his talent for self-publicity rapidly made him the most famous representative of the movement. Throughout his life he cultivated eccentricity and exhibitionism (one of his most famous acts was appearing in a diving suit at the opening of the London Surrealist exhibition in 1936), claiming that this was the source of his creative energy. He took over the Surrealist theory of automatism but transformed it into a more positive method which he named `critical paranoia’.

According to this theory one should cultivate genuine delusion as in clinical paranoia while remaining residuary aware at the back of one’s mind that the control of the reason and will has been deliberately suspended. He claimed that this method should be used not only in artistic and poetical creation but also in the affairs of daily life.

His paintings employed a meticulous academic technique that was contradicted by the unreal `dream’ space he depicted and by the strangely hallucinatory characters of his imagery. He described his pictures as
`hand-painted dream photographs’ and had certain favourite and recurring images, such as the human figure with half-open drawers protruding from it, burning giraffes, and watches bent and flowing as if made from melting wax (The Persistence of Memory, MOMA, New York; 1931).


http://www.duke.edu/web/lit132/dalibio.html

Film Influence - Pans Labyrinthe

Pans Labyrinth is a beautiful dark film with fantastical creatures, which form apart of a unreal world which a young girl imagines. I love the fairytale quality of the photography and this is a quality I hope to achieve in my final images.


The movie opens with a fairy tale. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a young girl who loves to read, lies on the ground, bleeding, while the narration explains that Princess Moanna of the Underground Realm, curious about the world above, escapes to the Earth, where the sun blinds her and, forgetting her past, she weakens and dies. Nonetheless, her father retains hope that her spirit will eventually return to him.

The story then cuts to post-Civil War Spain in 1944, with Francisco Franco firmly in power. Ofelia is traveling with her pregnant mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) to join Captain Vidal (Sergi López i Ayats), her new stepfather and father of Carmen’s unborn child, at his post in the mountains where he is rooting out Spanish Maquis guerrillas.

Ofelia discovers a stick insect that she believes to be a fairy, which follows her to the mill where Vidal is stationed. She chases it into an ancient Labyrinth nearby, where she meets Vidal’s housekeeper, Mercedes (Maribel Verdú), who treats her kindly but takes her home. Later that night, Ofelia overhears Mercedes and the local doctor conspiring to help the rebels.

After waking her in the middle of the night, the insect appears in Ofelia’s bedroom where it changes into a fairy and leads her outside and through the Labyrinth. There, she meets a Faun (Doug Jones), who says that he believes her to be Princess Moanna. He gives her three tasks to complete before the full moon to ensure that her “essence is intact” so that she can return to her father’s realm.

Ofelia receives the first task of retrieving a key from the belly of a giant toad that lives deep beneath the roots of a fig tree. The tree is being eaten from inside by the toad, but Ofelia succeeds in killing the toad and retrieving the key. Ofelia is becoming more worried about her mother, who has been ordered to stay in bed as after an episode of severe bleeding. The faun tells Ofelia of a way to restore her mother to health: placing a mandrake root in a bowl of fresh milk underneath her bed.

After carrying out the faun’s prescription, Ofelia then undertakes the second task of using the key to retrieve an ornate dagger from the lair of the Pale Man (also played by Jones), a grotesque, child-eating monster who sits absolutely silent and motionless in front of a large feast. Although she was gravely warned not to consume anything, she eats two grapes, awakening the Pale Man, who eats two of her fairy friends and pursues her. She narrowly escapes by drawing an escape door with a piece of chalk. However, infuriated at her disobedience, the faun refuses to give her the third task.

Events upon Earth take an even grimmer turn as Vidal captures and brutally interrogates a rebel. The doctor, who has been staying with them to help Carmen, is ordered to tend the wounds of the tortured rebel, so that he can be interrogated further. Instead, at the rebel’s request, the doctor euthanizes him. Vidal, in turn, kills the doctor for his disobedience and treachery. Meanwhile, Carmen goes into labor after Vidal discovers the mandrake root and she burns it.

She dies in childbirth, but delivers a healthy son. Vidal discovers that Mercedes is a spy, and he captures her and Ofelia as they attempt to escape. Ofelia is locked in her bedroom, and Mercedes is taken to be tortured; however, she frees herself using a hidden knife with which she stabs and gives Vidal a Glasgow smile, though it doesn’t kill him. She then flees, but is caught. At the last moment, the rebels, her brother among them, arrive and rescue her.

The faun returns to Ofelia and gives her one more chance to prove herself. He tells her to take her baby brother into the Labyrinth. She then uses the magic chalk to escape her room and sneak into Vidal’s room. She drugs Vidal and grabs her brother. A disoriented Vidal chases her through the Labyrinth while the rebels attack the mill and Mercedes searches for her. Upon reaching the center, the faun, wielding the ornate dagger that Ofelia had absconded with from the Pale Man’s lair, menacingly explains that the portal to the Underworld will open only with the blood of an innocent, so she must hand him her brother.

Ofelia refuses. The faun vociferously berates Ofelia for her disobedience, asking her if she was willing to give up her chance of being an immortal Princess to protect her infant brother. Ofelia says yes. The faun replies, “As you wish”, then disappears. Vidal had been watching Ofelia appear to be talking to herself, and just as the faun disappears, Vidal approaches, forcibly takes the baby, and shoots Ofelia in the stomach. She falls to the ground, barely alive and bleeding.

When Vidal leaves the Labyrinth, the rebels and Mercedes are waiting for him. Realizing he will die, he calmly hands Mercedes the baby, and starts to request that they tell his son what time his father died, but Mercedes informs him that his son “will never even know [his] name”. Mercedes’ rebel brother shoots Vidal in the face, killing him.

Mercedes and the rebels enter the labyrinth to find Ofelia dying, in a reprise of the opening scene. While Ofelia’s blood drips onto the altar that was the gateway into the Underworld, the scene flashes to a dream-like state: Ofelia is reunited with the king (Federico Luppi) (her deceased father, resurrected) and queen (her mother, alive again) of the underworld.

The faun is there, as are the fairies. Ofelia learns that by sacrificing herself, instead of her brother, she has succeeded at the true final task, proving herself to be the Princess Moanna and achieving immortality. The moment Ofelia learns she is the Princess of the Underworld, she smiles; at that same instant, upon Earth, she dies. The movie ends hopefully, with the old fig tree in bloom again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan%27s_Labyrinth

Film Influence - Silent Hill

Silent Hill is a film I defiantly want to use as inspiration for my images. The director creates an eerie misty supernatural world where strange creatures exist, not unlike the dark, weird world I want to create in the hell, death and purgatory photo shoots. I want them to all be very dark but also very poetic like this film.

I also love the quality of the costumes in the film in creating this unreal atmosphere and I will bee looking to this film for inspiration on the outfits I will use for my photo shoots.

Rose and her husband Christopher Da Silva are concerned about their adopted daughter Sharon who has been experiencing nightmares and has begun sleepwalking. Their only clue to the girl’s condition is her repetition of the name “Silent Hill.” Desperate for answers, Rose takes Sharon to the town of Silent Hill, West Virginia.

On her way there, she attracts the suspicions of police officer Cybil Bennett, who gives chase on her motorbike. It is in the midst of this chase that Rose and Sharon arrive at Silent Hill: as they enter, Rose crashes the car in an attempt to avoid a mysterious child in the middle of the road, knocking herself unconscious. When she awakens, Sharon is nowhere to be seen.

Rose searches the empty streets of the town for her missing child. Instead, she encounters a series of monstrous creatures and a ragged woman named Dahlia Gillespie who speaks of terrible things done to her own daughter, Alessa, by the townspeople. She claims that Sharon is actually her own daughter, not Rose’s.

Rose later encounters Cybil, who immediately arrests her. Upon discovering that the road out of the town has mysteriously disappeared, they are attacked by a deformed creature, and Rose escapes handcuffed. As events unfold, Cybil allows her to go free and the two work side-by-side to survive in the hellish town.

Scenes of their search are interspersed with scenes of Christopher’s search of the town, with the reluctant assistance of Officer Thomas Gucci, who admits to have grown up in Silent Hill. Christopher discovers documents showing the town was abandoned after a terrible fire 30 years ago, along with a photo of Dahlia’s daughter who bears a remarkable resemblance to Sharon.

Christopher is arrested by Officer Gucci when he tries to question the nun at the Toluca County Orphanage about Sharon and Alessa, and is told to stop investigating Silent Hill under threat of incarceration. Additionally, Officer Gucci shows Christopher his hideously scarred hands (hidden by leather gloves), which will later connect him to Alessa’s story.

Meanwhile, Rose and Cybil find refuge from Silent Hill’s many monsters in the town church, where they discover the remaining townspeople, a religious cult, headed by Christabella. After convincing Christabella that she wants to find “the demon” so feared by the townspeople, Rose (along with Cybil) is taken to a hospital in the town, where they are told the darkness resides. Here, Christabella discovers the likeness between Sharon and Alessa - via the photo of Sharon in Rose’s locket - and condemns Rose and Cybil as witches.

An attempt is made to catch them: Cybil sacrifices herself to enable Rose to escape and is captured and beaten with pipes by the townspeople while Rose descends into the basement of the hospital. Rose eventually encounters a badly burned figure - Alessa - in a hospital bed and a mysterious little girl who strongly resembles the missing Sharon.

In an extended flashback, Rose discovers the truth: Silent Hill has a long history of ritual witch burnings, stemming from the puritan-like fanaticism of the cult, which has a strong presence within the town.

Thirty years before the start of the movie, Alessa, whose mother was a member of said cult, was heavily stigmatized as an incarnation of sin for having been born out of wedlock and having been abandoned by her father: her schoolmates bully and humiliate her, with adults doing no apparent effort to protect Alessa (making no move to help even when, after taking refuge from the jeering in a bathroom, locking herself in with an orderly named Colin, who is implied to have raped/hurt her: Dahlia is later shown trying to coax her out, alone).

In her desperation, Dahlia agrees to Christabella’s suggestions that she allow them to ‘restore the innocence’ in her daughter. The cult gathers at Silent Hill’s Grand Hotel for this purpose. When not allowed to follow her daughter into the ritual, Dahlia guesses at the cult’s ill intentions and runs for the police.

In the meantime, Alessa is subjected to a hideous ritual burning: the conditions of her birth are seen by the cult as marks of sin, for which they must burn her or face the Apocalypse. However, in the midst of the ritual, the cage by which she is suspended directly above the red hot coals swings, dumping the coal and setting fire to the hotel, then the city.

When Dahlia returns to the still smoldering hotel with the police, Alessa is burnt beyond recognition but still alive. Notably, Alessa’s rescue is performed by Officer Gucci (whose burns are revealed to have been caused by grabbing the still hot iron cage in an effort to open it).

Rose is also told that Sharon is a manifestation of Alessa’s remaining innocence and goodness, sent away to the orphanage, where she was subsequently adopted by Rose and Christopher. After the flashback, Rose is told that she must aid Alessa in her revenge by granting her entry to the church (which she cannot enter due to the ‘blind faith’ within it): she is also told that Christabella will soon find Sharon and attempt to burn her as well. Rose agrees to help Alessa get her revenge. Alessa rises from the depths of the town to exact her revenge on the cult, while her mother Dahlia watches in horror.

Rose re-enters the church soon after Cybil is burned to death by the townspeople, and Sharon is about to suffer a similar fate. She confronts the townspeople and Christabella with what she knows, attempting to convince the cult that they are in denial of their own fate.

Angered at what she believes to be heresy, Christabella stabs Rose. Rose’s blood drips onto the church floor, opening the way for Alessa. The adult Alessa and her doppelganger rise out of the pit, and proceed to kill Christabella and the townspeople with huge tangles of barbed wire, leaving Dahlia the sole inhabitant of Silent Hill.

As the carnage ensues, Rose rescues Sharon and protects her. Sharon looks up to see Alessa’s dark double looking down on her. Before Rose and Sharon/Alessa leave, Dahlia asks why Alessa did not kill her, too. Rose replies with the words that Cybil had told her in the church: “Mother is God in the eyes of a child.” Rose and Alessa leave Silent Hill and return home. Nevertheless, although Rose and Alessa are in the same room as Christopher, they cannot see each other - the world inhabited by Rose and Alessa is shrouded in mist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hill_(film)

Film Influence - The Cell

This film is deep and dark with stunning imagery with weird concepts like a horse split into pieces with bits of glass in between each piece, which the actress walks through. It has many scenes with weird concepts and it makes you feel a little uneasy looking at it, but defiantly makes you feel curious to watch more.

Based on religious themes such as demons and the sacred mother Mary, it is easy for me to get inspired by the amazing imagery of the film and the passion and fierceness of the actors.


Child psychologist Catherine Deane (Lopez) is an expert in an experimental treatment for coma patients: a virtual reality device that allows her to enter into the minds of her patients and attempt to coax them into consciousness. When serial killer Carl Rudolph Stargher (Vincent D’Onofrio) falls into a coma before the FBI can locate his final victim, Agent Novak (Vince Vaughn) persuades Deane to enter Stargher’s mind and discover the victim’s location.[1] As Deane enters Stargher’s mind, his victim is trapped in a cell that slowly fills with water by means of an automatic timer.

Deane enters Stargher’s twisted mind, where she is confronted by both the violent and innocent parts of the killer’s psyche. The innocent half shows her the abuse he suffered at his father’s hands, and the drowning of an injured bird as a mercy killing. Deane attempts to nurture the innocent side of Stargher’s mind, but his murderous half thwarts her at every turn.

Despite Deane’s best efforts, she becomes trapped in Stargher’s dark dreamscape. Novak volunteers to enter Stargher’s mind and attempts to rescue her. He breaks Deane from Stargher’s hold and discovers clues to the whereabouts of his victim, Novak relates his revalations to his team and they are able to track down the location of Stargher’s victim (Stargher had been entrusted by a company to take care of an advanced water pump, which he used to fill the cell with water). Novak discovers Stargher’s secret underground room and saves Stargher’s victim just in time. Meanwhile, Deane decides to reverse the process and pull Stargher’s mind into her own.

She presents Stargher’s innocent side with a paradise, but his murderous side is always present, and manifests as a serpent.

This time, however, Deane has all the power; she attacks the serpent-Stargher, but discovers that she cannot destroy one half without killing the other. Stargher’s innocent side reminds her of the bird he drowned, and she kills him out of mercy. She adopts Stargher’s dog, and successfully uses her new technique on her other coma patient.

Some of the scenes in The Cell are inspired by works of art. A scene in which a horse is split into sections by falling glass panels was inspired by the works of British artist Damien Hirst. The film also includes scenes based on the work of other late 20th century artists, including Odd Nerdrum, H. R. Giger, and the Brothers Quay. Tarsem — who began his career directing music videos such as En Vogue’s “Hold On” and R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” — drew upon such imagery for Stargher’s dream sequences. In particular, he was influenced by videos directed by Mark Romanek, such as “Closer” and “The Perfect Drug” by Nine Inch Nails, “Bedtime Story” ny Madonna, and the many videos that Floria Sigismondi directed for Marilyn Manson.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cell

Film Influence - What Dreams May Come

I was advised to watch this film as it relates to my project in that it is about the afterlife, heaven, hell and purgatory and it defiantly fuelled my imagination about these things. I especially love the scenes where Chris walks across a sea of heads in purgatory, this gave me ideas of how I want my souls to be like in my purgatory shoot. Like tortured souls, lost in a strange world, unable to understand what they are going through.

After meeting in Switzerland, Chris Nielsen and Annie Collins marry, having two children: Ian (Josh Paddock) and Marie (Jessica Brooks Grant).

Years later, after Ian and Marie are killed in a car accident, Annie becomes mentally unstable and attempts suicide. She is institutionalized, and although the couple nearly divorce as a result, she eventually recovers. However, on the anniversary of the day the couple decided not to divorce (which they call their “Double-D” anniversary) Chris is involved in a car accident, dying a short time later.

Chris awakens in the afterlife, adjusting to his new environment with the guidance of a man named Albert (Cuba Gooding Jr.), whom Chris believes to be his friend and mentor from his medical residency. Both are surprised when a Blue Jacaranda tree appears in Chris’s personal section of Heaven, which matches a tree in a new painting of Annie’s. Albert indicates the couple are soul mates, receptive to each other’s thoughts even after death.

Later, Chris meets a woman named Leona who shows him a children’s realm in heaven. Chris recognizes her as Marie, after realizing the location is a diorama she loved in life, and Leona explaining that she took the form of an Asian woman because when they travelled to Singapore, her father smiled at an Asian stewardess with name tag writing |Leona|. He told the daughter that Asian women were lovely, graceful and smart. Since then the daughter always wanted to be like that.

In parallel to this, Annie, distraught at the loss of her family, takes poison and dies. Albert breaks the news to Chris, whose initial relief that her suffering is over quickly turns to anger when he learns that suicides are sent to hell. Albert claims no judgment has been made against her; it is simply the nature of suicides. This is a reference to Dante’s Inferno, where the seventh level of Hell is reserved for sins of violence — including violence against oneself.

Chris is adamant that he will rescue Annie from Hell, despite Albert’s insistence that no one has ever succeeded in doing so. Chris is undaunted, and Albert eventually agrees to find Chris a “Tracker” to help find Annie’s soul.

Journeying to Hell and encountering hundreds of damned souls (one of which is a cameo by German director Werner Herzog) Chris finds himself recalling memories of his son, Ian. Chris had been disappointed with Ian’s underachievement but eventually, after an earnest conversation, told him “if I was going through fucking hell, I’d only want one person in the whole goddamn world by my side.” Seeing Albert about to confront a violent group of damned, Chris realizes Albert is actually Ian. Ian explains that he chose to appear as Albert because he was the only person Chris would ever listen to. Ian returns to Heaven, while Chris and the Tracker continue the search.

Arriving at what the Tracker calls their “private deck”, Chris finds a field full of the faces of the damned (a further reference to Dante’s Inferno). Chris sees Annie’s face but as he runs towards her, the ground gives way and he falls into a vast, upturned cathedral. Chris recognizes his and Annie’s house at the bottom. The Tracker warns Chris that if he stays with Annie for more than a few minutes, he may become permanently trapped too. The Tracker then reveals that he is Albert, who has been waiting for many years to do Chris a favor.

Chris enters the house to find Annie pale and withdrawn. Chris is unable to make Annie recognize him and decides to “give up,” and join Annie forever, even if she will never know who he is. This is the antithesis of his behavior when Annie was institutionalized (which was to ask for a divorce, since he was unable to join in her grief for their children), and enables Annie to recognize Chris and allows the two to escape to heaven.

Chris and Annie are reunited with their children, but Chris suggests being reincarnated, so the pair can experience meeting and falling in love again. The film ends with Chris and Annie meeting as young children, in a rough parallel of their original meeting. The last line is a repetition of the opening line by Chris: “When I was young, I met this beautiful girl by a lake.”

Film Influence - Mirror Mask

I saw this film and was inspired immediately, its a fantasy film full of imagination and weirdness, something I want in my images. I love the style of the art/ photography in the film, its is dark and strange. A world is created far beyond the imagination, just like a dream. I love how dark the film is but yet is also very beautiful.


Helena (Stephanie Leonidas) works with her parents (Gina McKee and Rob Brydon) at their family circus, but desires to “run away and join real life”. At the next performance after Helena and her mother have a heated argument, Helena’s mother collapses and is taken to the hospital. Ten days later, the doctors determine that Helena’s mother requires an operation, and Helena can only blame herself for the situation.

That night, she wakes up in a dream-like state and encounters three performers outside her apartment building. As they try to perform, two of them are consumed by a shadow, and the third, named Valentine (Jason Barry), helps to quickly direct Helena to safety. She learns they are in the City of Light which is slowly being consumed by shadows, causing its widely-varied citizens to flee. Helena is mistaken for the Princess.

She and Valentine are taken to the Prime Minister (Brydon), who explains that the Princess from the Land of Shadow stole a charm from the City of Light, leaving their White Queen (McKee) in a state of unnatural sleep and the City vulnerable to the Shadows. Helena offers to help recover the charm.

As Helena and Valentine seek out clues, they are unaware they are being watched by the Queen of Shadows (McKee), mistakenly believing Helena to be the Princess of the Land of Shadows. Helena discovers that by looking through the windows of the buildings, she can see into her apartment room through the windows on drawings she created on one wall of her room, and discovers that a doppelganger of herself is behaving radically different from her and that the doppelganger is aware of her presence in the drawings.

Helena and Valentine learn the stolen charm is called the “MirrorMask”, and seek it out in a white building filled with hundreds of locks. However, Valentine betrays Helena and gives her to the Queen of Shadows. Helena is hypnotized into thinking she is the Princess, but Valentine has a change of heart and returns to help Helena break the hypnosis and recover her memories. The two search the Princess’ room, and Helena discovers the MirrorMask hidden in the Princess’ mirror; the two flee the Queen of Shadows’ castle with the charm.

Helena realizes that the doppelganger in the real world is the Princess, and that she has started to destroy the drawings on Helena’s wall to prevent her from using the MirrorMask. With all the windows to the real world destroyed, the Princess goes to the apartment roof to toss the drawings away, but discovers that Helena had previously drawn a window on the roof’s door.

Helena uses that window to invoke the power of the MirrorMask to return herself to the real world and banish the Princess back to her own realm. Helena finds herself safely on her apartment’s roof, with her father telling her that her mother’s operation was a success. Helena apologizes to both her parents for her behavior. Some time later, as she is happily working at the circus, she encounters a young man who appears very similar to Valentine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MirrorMask

Photographer Influence - Jean-François Campos

When looking at the themes of Life and Death I came across this fashion story by Jean Francois Campos. What I love about it is, whilst it is still a fashion story it is very raw and full of emotion. I like how the model is very beautiful but in contrast actors are used who are made to look very grotesque in comparison.

It is my biggest aim to make my models act in the photos and so I must not only think about how they will be composed and the elements that will make up the frame but also what the model will be doing within the frame.

I love how the people in the frames are acting out a scene, seeing these images makes me realise as a photographer that I need to think of how I want my models and people involved in the shoots express what I want them to and it is up to me to communicate to them what my vision is.


Jean-François Campos was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1966.

He embarked on his career as a photographer in 1988 during a visit to Berlin. He continued this photo report in 1989, before, during and after the fall of the Berlin wall and his work was shown in the “Berlin à coeur ouvert” exhibition at the FNAC in 1990.

The same year, he won two prizes, from the Fondation Angnénieux and the Biennale des jeunes créateurs de l’Europe de la méditerranée (Biennial exhibition of young creators from Mediterranean Europe). His work was shown in the “Vieille Charité” in the centre of Marseille and the “Espace photographique” in Paris.

From 1990 to 1993, he was a member of Agence Editing.

In 1991, he was commissioned by the Marseille public transport department to do a photo report on life beside the sea, which was shown in 1992.

The same year, he embarked on a long-term contract with the newspaper Libération, which continued until 1996.

In this capacity, he photographed Jacques Chirac during the seven months of the presidential campaign, and more recently, the critical situation of Rwandan refugees in Northern Zaire.

He joined Agence VU in July 1995 when he was covering the Avignon Festival, and a few weeks later his photographs of Jacques Chirac’s campaign were exhibited at the International Festival of Photo-journalism in Perpignan.

In 1996, he was awarded the World Press Photo Foundation Masterclass prize for his work with Libération, and also the Centre National de la Photographie (French Photography Centre) Moins Trente (Under Thirty) prize.

Approach “The possibilities can be infinite. Cutting reality up, organising. Acting like a journalist and making poetry too. Being serious, taking yourself seriously, making fun of things, mocking. Reporting the news is definitely a perilous exercise.

The news, I saw it without really being completely there. From the politics of the candidate Chirac to what was happening alongside that; strikes, the workers, I know it was all there, but I don’t remember it that well anymore.

Finally, I was in an intimate space, the memory of which I share in these photographs, a space that was more personal than real: I was there, but also elsewhere”

http://forums.thefashionspot.com/f71/jean-fran-ois-campos-photographer-38462.html

Photographer Influence - Bruno Dayan

Looking at Bruce Dayan’s images is like living in a dream world, they are slightly surreal and with stunning lighting and styling they really are so beautiful. In his images he creates something truly magical.


What I want to take from his images is his perfect posing of the model and beautiful composition, like Tim Walker he also uses stunning sets for his images and gets the model to almost act rather then pose to create a mood to the images.

Bruno Dayan is known for his glamorous and sensual fashion photography. Using unique lighting and interesting sets, Dayan creates captivating photos that really show off the beauty of his subjects. It’s rare to find a true talent like him who can get everything right. It’s no wonder that high fashion brands like Louis Vuitton, Moschino and Yves Saint Laurent have often Dayan to bring their campaigns to life.

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/you-sweet-gorgeous-thing

Photographer Influence - Miles Aldridge

Another amazing photographer is Miles Aldridge, I see in his work an awkward beauty, like the contrast of beauty and ugly and this is a notion that I myself like to use in my images. Whilst I want my images to look beautiful and elegant i also like to use contrasting factors for visual impact and to shock the viewer.

I also love Miles’ use of colour, he uses very strong colour themes, picking out certain colours and making them a feature, which is something I want to do with my images, often one colour he uses will be strong, bold and stand out against a pale or dark background which I like very much.


Something’s always a little off in Miles Aldridge’s world. The London-based fashion photographer has made his career on images that are almost diabolically surreal—a woman with a perfect lipstick pout, crumpled against a countertop, stabbing a birthday cake; a lady clad just-so in yellow, pushing an empty swing; a disembodied mouth biting into a forkful of spaghetti.

The neon-hued weirdness of Aldridge’s shots makes them leap off pages of magazines and into the same psychological territory as early Almodóvar films: All his women are on the verge of a nervous breakdown. (An exception to the rule, perhaps: Aldridge’s wife, model Kristen McMenamy.)

Symptoms of Aldridge-mania include: titillation, studious blankness, frenzy. Now, Aldridge-mania is coming stateside. On Thursday, Aldridge opened the first U.S. show of his work at the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea. Today, he publishes Miles Aldridge: Pictures for Photographs (Editions 7L/Steidl), a compilation of his photographs for magazines such as Vogue Italia and Numéro. This week, Aldridge takes over the Fifth Avenue windows at Henri Bendel, re-creating a few of his images with mannequins. Aldridge will be on hand at Bendel’s to open the display and sign books; here, he talks to Style.com about good luck, lots of cats, and puckers.

You studied illustration at Central Saint Martins. How did you wind up a fashion photographer?

To a certain extent, I just got lucky. In London, around ‘95, I was dating this girl who was really beautiful, but not beautiful in a particularly model-y way, at least as that was understood at the time. Basically, she was too short. But then Kate Moss came along, and my girlfriend decided she could be a model after all, so she asked me to take some photos of her, which I did. When she showed her book to British Vogue, they asked to see me. Her career never really got off the ground, but that’s how mine started. It was a good time—between Kate and the whole grunge thing, if you were English and could hold a camera, people in New York would meet with you. And my sister, who was a model, let me know that in her experience all photographers were idiots, so therefore I was qualified.

Your photos now have such a distinctive style—was that already in play when you did those test shots for your ex-girlfriend?

No, those photos had a real naturalness and simplicity to them; I think what caught the eye of the people at British Vogue was they expressed, openly, the love I had for my girlfriend. It was as I began working that I realized I wanted to do something a little different. I mean, the prevalent fashion photography when I started out was just appalling to me—lots of glamorous women on yachts, that sort of thing. Fatuous, really. I wanted to do something more complex and strange. I like to show a woman troubled by something secret.

You’ve never stopped illustrating, though. The first part of Pictures for Photographs is composed of the sketches you made before shoots. What made you want to show that work?

The illustrations were the initial inspiration for the book. I sent one of my sketchbooks to Karl Lagerfeld, he thought it was really cool, and he suggested I come to Paris and meet him and Gerhard Steidl at the Chanel couture show. So I packed up my portfolios and dragged them on the Eurostar, and we decided to make a book that was part sketches, part photos. I kind of like the idea that people can take the sketches on their own—obviously, they could go through the sketches and try to find the corresponding photo, but in a way I’d prefer if they didn’t do that, and just looked at them as, I don’t know, my random doodlings of women. I mean, I use the drawings to plan my work—I think it gives me an advantage that way, because I can kind of predict a picture—but then the photograph takes on a life of its own, you know?

Your father, Alan Aldridge, was a seminal illustrator—he was a key figure in the development of the sixties psychedelic aesthetic and collaborated with the Beatles and so on. Is his work an influence on you?

Sure. The whole reason I studied illustration was because I thought it would be cool to be like my dad. But at this point, you know, my inspiration comes from everywhere. There’s a photo in the book of a bottle of spilled ketchup, for example, and that literally came from my seeing my wife spill a bottle of ketchup as she was bringing dinner in for our kids. Good husband that I am, I sat there thinking, how do I make a photo of this? Rather than helping her clean up, I mean. And then there was the time we went to visit her mother in Pennsylvania, and her mother takes care of—I’m going to say dozens, maybe a hundred cats. She’d put food out for them, and all of a sudden these animals would come creeping out of the hedges.

That was odd. So I used that. And more generally, it’s like, I always want my models to have a kind of blankness of expression, which I don’t see so much as a blankness as that look of contemplation I see on people’s faces when they ride the bus or wait at the airport. That’s the thing about being a fashion photographer—you spend a good amount of time waiting around in airport lounges and places like that, so you have a lot of opportunity to observe people. And it’s like, there’s a Martin Amis book, The Information, where the main character imagines all the men around him at home at night, crying in bed. In a way, that’s what I’m doing when I’m waiting around.

How did you choose the photographs for the book?

The photographs were edited by me and Gerhard, together. We decided, after looking at all the work, that we wanted to have a rhythm that went between innocence and dirtiness, charm and seediness, happiness and strangeness. So the Virgin Mary pictures go to the couple fooling around in the back of a car, and then onto the happy mother making the cake, and then we see a hand groping at a breast, with the butterflies fluttering around. I wanted there to be a rhythm and a suspense, something to make people turn the page. It’s all sort of an ongoing storyboard for some epic film in my head about women.

http://www.style.com/stylefile/2009/06/a-conversation-with-photographer-miles-aldridge/

Photographer Influence - Tim Walker

I first came across Tim Walkers work when I went to an exhibition of his work at The Design Museum in London and have since seen his work many times in the pages of Vogue Magazine. He has an unmistakable style which you can always pick out his images from everyone else’s.

Now one of my favourite photographers, I love the fairytale quality to his images, the beautiful lighting and the drama and emotion in his models eyes.

I have learnt from his way of organising shoots how I want to approach my project, because of course I have huge ideas and ambitions for each shoot, but to me this is the excitement, I don’t want my images to be simple, but complex works of art full of meaning, allowing the viewer to be wowed at their brilliance.

I find that I envisage an idea and will then have to go to any length to reach it in an image, like Tim Walker and although I don’t have the great budget that he has on shoots I will try my best to create the images I see in my head, hopefully pouring out my imagination and thoughts on life and death onto the final images. I hope I can create a fairytale beauty in my photos like Tim Walker does time and time again.

The photographer Tim Walker brings the imagination and beauty of Beaton and Parkinson to the pages of Vogue, albeit with a modern flavour. Robin Muir admires his fantasy landscapes, on show as part of a major retrospective at the Design Museum

At Vogue it all used to be so simple. When Tony Armstrong-Jones, as Lord Snowdon then was, went to the United States in 1958 at the dawn of jet-age travel, the fashion editor took ‘me, a trunk of clothes and one model, Pagan Grigg. She did her own make-up and if we needed a man, her fiancé obliged. Not much fuss, really…’

Half a century on, this is Tim Walker’s checklist for a Christmas shoot in Essex: 20 ballerinas, 17 ‘mirrored’ geese, 250 ostrich eggs (sprayed gold), a box of giant plastic hands, a room full of white umbrellas, 20 Christmas trees, a wolf’s head-and-feet costume, a giant pumpkin, fake silver armour, a horse (also sprayed gold), hundreds of ‘Arabian Nights’ oil lamps, and racks of dresses, costumes and ballerina tutus.

‘And lots of rabbits from Norfolk,’ Sophie Baudrand, Vogue’s fashion-budget supremo, recalls, ‘special ones that didn’t fornicate, supposedly…’ In addition, Vogue bought a vintage Rolls-Royce - cheaper than risking damaging a hired one in a field. ‘Fashion Pantomime’ was one of Vogue’s most expensive few days outdoors. ‘I think I’ve mostly blocked it out,’ Baudrand, good fairy to Walker’s spendthrift pixie, says.

Though Tim Walker’s shoots can be operatic in scale and ambition, matching an unrestrained imagination with a collection of preparatory sketches, it pays off. Not since Beaton in the 1930s or Parkinson in the 1950s have Vogue’s pages sung so loudly. It is unlikely that any other fashion photographer would base a depiction of the season’s couture on the disquieting children’s book The Adventures of the Two Dutch Dolls (1895).

Walker, 37, loves, he says, turning ‘funny daydreams into funny photographs,’ adding that he lives much of the time ‘in an imaginary world’, a world rooted in real-life and memory, specifically the British countryside of his childhood: the manicured landscape of Surrey and the wilder downlands of Sussex and Dorset. He admits to a subscription to Country Life and ‘a very happy childhood’. His days at Exeter Art College were happy, too, spent making for the camera ‘crowns out of wheat and going round junk shops and making things in the kitchen. I liked to walk through the countryside with a camera and photograph the people I knew. When I had a camera there was always a reason to go somewhere.’

He had a few false starts. A work placement in Vogue’s library found him cataloguing Beaton’s negatives, the model of how not to catalogue a photographer’s negatives, it must be said. But it allowed Walker to discover Beaton. An apprenticeship with Richard Avedon in New York reinforced an affection for the English landscape that grew more idealised the longer he stayed away. Avedon taught him a mantra he swears by: ‘Rattle through it. Never think too much. Explain later.’

‘I wasn’t the best assistant,’ he admits. In New York, all he really had to do was open up the studio, empty its waste-paper baskets and close it up at night. Invariably, hours later, Avedon would appear in his pyjamas clutching a baseball bat and crying out, ‘Who’s there? Who’s there?’ - the night air rent by the wail of another mis-set alarm.

But Walker’s fate was probably sealed by another incident. Latterly, Avedon would sit cross-legged on the floor to direct his photographs, and regularly needed someone to hoist him up. Once - just once - Walker was in the line of fire: ‘I pulled him up but then, for some reason, I let go too early and dropped him.’ Avedon went ‘apeshit. In front of 40 people.’ And back to England went Walker.

More than a decade later, Walker is celebrating with a retrospective at the Design Museum and book that he has painstakingly put together as a portfolio of his work. He follows in the line of the great Vogue masters; hopefully Avedon, Parkinson and Beaton would have recognised a kindred spirit and applauded the colour, the life and the fantasy brought once again to fashion photography.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/3364904/Tim-Walker-adventures-in-wonderland.html

Photographer Influence - David La Chapelle

In my images I hope to create something truly epic and very dramatic, images that will be really striking to the viewer and will hold their attention enough to stand looking at them in an attempt to work them out. I guess this is my biggest aim, to have the viewer question what they are all about and maybe just for a few minutes question the themes I am trying to portray.

David La Chapelle is one photographer that I love and has inspired me greatly for the project. I love how bold the themes are and the fact he isn’t afraid to shock the audience into thinking about what is before them. I love how striking and complex his images are, the sets he builds and the ideas behind each one, this is something I definatly want to achive in my images



David Lachapelle was born in Connecticut, north Carolina in 1968. he studied at the art student’s league and north Carolina school of arts. at age of 19, Mr. Lachapelle went to New York where he met Andy Warhol. He began his photography career created by Warhol.

David lachapelle is a photographer who tends to create his own visionary world, rather than reproduce what’s visible in the world, a photography style that can be compared to no one.

David lachapelle has evolved his photography into an idiosyncratic and highly personal combination of reportage and surrealism. Lachapelle is one of photography’s brightest stars, bringing high intensity, larger than life images to the pages of magazines worldwide (as i-D, arena, the New York time magazine, rolling stones, vogue, the face, the London Sunday times and vanity fair).

Initially distinguished by his campy fixation with white-trash culture, lachapelle is also known for his ground breaking use of computer manipulation and futuristic fashion shoots and for placing Hollywood celebrities
from madonna, Uma Thurman, elton John to drew Barrymore to the X-files’ david Duchovny in wildly imaginative and often compromising erotically charged settings.

La Chapelle’s monstrosities are that breed of gaunt, blemish less human built and enslaved by heavy make up, lighting and the glorifying voodoo of photographic attention, e.g., models, transsexuals and Leonardo Di Caprio. it is a prophecy of even scurvier spiritual illness yet to come from our media-centric society, in the not so distant future.

http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/lachapelle.html

Literary Influence - Dante Divine Comedy

Dante

I loved reading Dantes The Divine Comedy it was about his journey through Hell, Purgatory and the to Heaven. I have decided to use quotes from the book to illustrate my images of purgatory. I like the visions of tortured souls fighting to get to heaven and having to be cleaned of sin before they can proceed on.

The Divine Comedy written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and his death in 1321, is widely considered the central epic poem of Italian literature, and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem’s imaginative and allegorical vision of the Christian afterlife is a culmination of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church. It helped establish the Tuscan dialect in which it is written as the Italian standard. It is divided into three parts, the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

The Divine Comedy is composed of over 14,000 lines that are divided into three canticas, Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise) each consisting of 33 cantos except for the Inferno which consists of 34. cantos. An initial canto serves as an introduction to the poem and is generally considered to be part of the first cantica, bringing the total number of cantos to 100. The number 3 is prominent in the work, represented here by the length of each cantica. The verse scheme used, terza rima, is hendecasyllabic (lines of eleven syllables), with the lines composing tercets according to the rhyme scheme aba, bcb, cdc, ded, ....

The poem is written in the first person, and tells of Dante’s journey through the three realms of the dead, lasting from the night before Good Friday to the Wednesday after Easter in the spring of 1300. The Roman poet Virgil guides him through Hell and Purgatory; Beatrice, Dante’s ideal woman, guides him through Heaven. Beatrice was a Florentine woman whom he had met in childhood and admired from afar in the mode of the then-fashionable courtly love tradition which is highlighted in Dante’s earlier work La Vita Nuova.

In Northern Italy’s political struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, Dante was part of the Guelphs, who in general favored the Papacy over the Holy Roman Emperor. Florence’s Guelphs split into factions around 1300, the White Guelphs, and the Black Guelphs.

Dante was among the White Guelphs who were exiled in 1302 by the Lord-Mayor Cante de’ Gabrielli di Gubbio, after troops under Charles of Valois entered the city, at the request of Pope Boniface VIII, who supported the Black Guelphs. This exile, which lasted the rest of Dante’s life, shows its influence in many parts of the Comedy, from prophecies of Dante’s exile to Dante’s views of politics to the eternal damnation of some of his opponents.

In Hell and Purgatory, Dante shares in the sin and the penitence respectively. The last word in each of the three parts of the Divine Comedy is stelle, “stars.”

Inferno

The poem begins on the night before Good Friday in the year 1300, “halfway along our life’s path” (Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita). Dante is thirty-five years old, half of the biblical life expectancy of 70 (Psalm 90:10), lost in a dark wood (perhaps, allegorically, contemplating suicide—as “wood” is figured in Canto XIII, and the mention of suicide is made in Canto I of Purgatorio with “This man has not yet seen his last evening; But, through his madness, was so close to it, That there was hardly time to turn about” implying that when Virgil came to him he was on the verge of suicide or morally passing the point of no return), assailed by beasts (a lion, a leopard, and a she-wolf) he cannot evade, and unable to find the “straight way” (diritta via) - also translatable as “right way” - to salvation (symbolized by the sun behind the mountain).

Conscious that he is ruining himself and that he is falling into a “deep place” (basso loco) where the sun is silent (‘l sol tace), Dante is at last rescued by Virgil, and the two of them begin their journey to the underworld. Each sin’s punishment in Inferno is a contrapasso, a symbolic instance of poetic justice; for example, fortune-tellers have to walk forwards with their heads on backwards, unable to see what is ahead, because they tried to do so in life.

Allegorically, the Inferno represents the Christian soul seeing sin for what it really is, and the three beasts represent three types of sin: the self-indulgent, the violent, and the malicious.[4] These three types of sin also provide the three main divisions of Dante’s Hell: Upper Hell (the first 5 Circles) for the self-indulgent sins; Circles 6 and 7 for the violent sins; and Circles 8 and 9 for the malicious sins.

Purgatorio

Having survived the depths of Hell, Dante and Virgil ascend out of the undergloom, to the Mountain of Purgatory on the far side of the world (in Dante’s time, it was believed that Hell existed underneath Jerusalem). The Mountain is on an island, the only land in the Southern Hemisphere, created by the displacement of rock which resulted when Satan’s fall created Hell.

At the shores of Purgatory, Dante and Virgil are attracted by a musical performance by Casella, but are reprimanded by Cato, a pagan who has been placed by God as the general guardian of the approach to the mountain. The text gives no indication whether or not Cato’s soul is destined for heaven: his symbolic significance has been much debated. (Cantos I and II).

Allegorically, the Purgatorio represents the Christian life. Christian souls arrive escorted by an angel, singing in exitu Israel de Aegypto. In his Letter to Cangrande, Dante explains that this reference to Israel leaving Egypt refers both to the redemption of Christ and to “the conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to the state of grace.”[6] Appropriately, therefore, it is Easter Sunday when Dante and Virgil arrive.

The Purgatorio is notable for demonstrating the medieval knowledge of a spherical Earth. During the poem, Dante discusses the different stars visible in the southern hemisphere, the altered position of the sun, and the various timezones of the Earth. At this stage it is, Dante says, sunset at Jerusalem, midnight on the River Ganges, and sunrise in Purgatory.

Paradiso

After an initial ascension (Canto I), Beatrice guides Dante through the nine celestial spheres of Heaven. These are concentric and spherical, similar to Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology. Dante admits that the vision of heaven he receives is the one that his human eyes permit him to see. Thus, the vision of heaven found in the Cantos is Dante’s own personal vision, ambiguous in its true construction. The addition of a moral dimension means that a soul that has reached Paradise stops at the level applicable to it.

Souls are allotted to the point of heaven that fits with their human ability to love God. Thus, there is a heavenly hierarchy. All parts of heaven are accessible to the heavenly soul. That is to say all experience God but there is a hierarchy in the sense that some souls are more spiritually developed than others. This is not determined by time or learning as such but by their proximity to God (how much they allow themselves to experience Him above other things). It must be remembered in Dante’s schema that all souls in Heaven are on some level always in contact with God.

While the structures of the Inferno and Purgatorio were based around different classifications of sin, the structure of the Paradiso is based on the four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues.

Purgatory- Chosen Quotes

A crowd of spirits, silent and devout.
The eyes of each were dark and hollow: pale
Their visage, and so lean withal, the bones
Stood staring thro’ the skin.

Before him all the regions of the bad;
And purpose now those spirits to display,
That under thy command are purg’d from sin.

Those spirits went beneath a weight like that
We sometimes feel in dreams, all, sore beset,
But with unequal anguish, wearied all,
Round the first circuit, purging as they go,
The world’s gross darkness off

Here my lot ordains
Under this weight to groan, till I appease
God’s angry justice, since I did it not
Amongst the living, here amongst the dead

The spirits, who from my breathing had perceiv’d I liv’d,
Grew pale with wonder.

These quotes I have chosen from Purgatorio show lost spirits, that appear strange and surreal, which is defiantly something I want to come across for these images. I want to play with the theme of sin, tortured souls and the weirdness and dream like quality that I perceive from reading these words.

Literary Influence - William Blake

William Blake


William Blake is another amazing poet whose words describe elements of life and death with strong imagery. I have chosen five of his poems to illustrate hell.

British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. William Blake was born in Soho, London, where he spent most of his life. The house of his parents, on the corner of Broad Street and Marshall Street, was erected upon an old burial ground.

Blake’s first biographer, Frederick Tatham, wrote that Blake “depised restraints & rules, so much that his Father dare not send him to School.” From his early years, Blake had experienced visions of angels and ghostly monks, he saw and conversed with the angel Gabriel, the Virgin Mary, and various historical figures. Blake’s parents encouraged him to collect prints of the Italian masters, and his father gave him engravings and plaster casts. Gothic art and architecture influenced him, and the work of Adam Ghisi and Albert Dürer.

In 1767 Blake was sent to Henry Pars’ drawing school, at No. 101 the Strand. At the age of 14, he was apprenticed for seven years to the engraver James Basire, working for him twelve hours a day, six days a week. Only on Sundays Blake returned to his family home. After studies at the Royal Academy School, where he did not have much respect for Sir Joshua Reynolds, the president of the Academy, Blake started to produce watercolors and engrave illustrations for magazines.

In 1783 he married Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a market gardener; the marriage was childless – none of Blake’s siblings had children. Blake taught Catherine to draw and paint and how to use a printing press. She assisted him devoutly. Just before his death Blake drew a portrait of her, saying, “you have ever been an angel to me”.

His early poems Blake wrote at the age of 12. However, being early apprenticed to a manual occupation, journalistic-social career was not open to him. His first book of poems, POETICAL SKETCHES, appeared in 1783 and was followed by SONGS OF INNOCENCE (1789), and SONGS OF EXPERIENCE (1794).

Each copy of Songs of Innocence was unique and the poems were never in the same order. The book was not a commercial or critical success. Blake’s most famous poem, ‘The Tyger’, was part of his Songs of Experience. Typical for Blake’s poems were long, flowing lines and violent energy, combined with aphoristic clarity and moments of lyric tenderness.

Blake was not blinded by conventions, but approached his subjects sincerely with a mind unclouded by current opinions. On the other hand this made him also an outsider. He approved of free love, and sympathized with the actions of the French revolutionaries but the Reign of Terror sickened him. In 1790 Blake engraved THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, his principal prose work, in which he expressed his revolt against the established values of his time: “Prisons are built with stones of Law, brothels with bricks of Religion.” Radically Blake sided with the Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost and attacked the conventional religious views in a series of paradoxical aphorisms.

But the poet’s life in the realms of images did not please his wife who once remarked: “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company. He is always in Paradise.” Some of Blake’s contemporaries called him a harmless lunatic.

Henry Fuseli, who was sixteen years Blake’s senior, recognized also a debt to him, and Fuseli was the only contemporary artist, whose ‘superiority’ Blake seems to have acknowledged. Blake’s writings did not interest Fuseli, but when he required a good draughtsman to prepare a frontispiece to his translation of Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man, which Joseph Johnson was about to publish, he asked Blake to do the engraving. However, Blake was not an easy person to get along with, especially in a subordinate role, and although they worked together on a number of designs, by 1803 their paths had separated. Fuseli is said to have admitted that “Blake is d—good to steal from.”

In 1774 Blake opened with his wife and younger brother Robert a print shop at 27 Broad Street, but the venture failed after the death of Robert in 1787, probably of consumption. Immediately upon his death Blake slept for three days and nights. The Blakes moved south of the Thames to Lambeth in 1790, where they had more room. During this time Blake began to work on his ‘prophetic books’, where he recorded his lifelong concern with the struggle of the soul to free its natural energies from reason and organized religion.

Although Blake first accepted Swedenborg’s ideas, he eventually rejected him. His mythical and visionary world he recorded in THE VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION (1793), in which the motto is, “The Eye sees more than the Heart knows”, AMERICA: A PROPHECY (1793), about the rebellion of American colonies and the British response, THE BOOK OF URIZEN (1794), an introduction to his cosmogony, THE SONG OF LOS (1795), and EUROPE (1794), which contains one of his most extraordinary images, God measuring the abyss below him with a pair of compasses. Blake hated the effects of the Industrial Revolution in England and looked forward to the establishment of a New Jerusalem “in England’s green and pleasant land.” Between 1804 and 1818 he produced an edition of his own poem JERUSALEM with 100 engravings.

In 1800 Blake was taken up by the wealthy William Hayley, poet and patron of poets, who had a house in Felpham, Sussex, and whose writings he began to illustrate, executing also other commissions. The Blakes rented a cottage at Felpham, staying there for three years. In a letter to a friend he wrote: “Meat is cheaper than in London, but the sweet air&the voices of winds, trees&birds, &the odours of the happy ground, makes it a dwelling for immortals.”

In this period, his attention was again drawn to Milton, perhaps after discussions with Hayley. MILTON: A POEM IN TWO BOOKS, TO JUSTIFY THE WAYS OF GOD TO MEN was finished and engraved between 1803 and 1808. After exchanging some heated words in argument with Private John Scofield, Blake was charged in 1803 at Chichester with high treason for having uttered such expressions as “D-n the King, d-n all his subjects...”

Blake was acquitted, and as the Sussex Advertiser later reported, the verdict “so gratified the auditory that the court was, in defiance of all decency, thrown into an uproar by their noisy exultations”.

Blake’s exhibition in 1809 at the shop once owned by his brother was commercially unsuccessful. However, economic problems did not diminish his creativity, but he continued to produce energetically poems, aphorisms, and engravings. “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction,” he wrote. While working on his own version of the Canterbury Pilgrims, Blake produced THE FOUR ZOAS, first called VALA. The long epic poems was rediscovered in 1889, and published in The Writings of William Blake (1893). Many of its drawings are erotic; the central motif is the erect penis.

In his old age, Blake enjoyed the admiration of a group of young artist, known as ‘The Ancients’. One of them called him “divine Blake”, who “had seen God, sir, and had talked with angels”. Moreover, he was many times helped by John Linnell, an younger artist.

Blake’s last years were passed in obscurity, quarreling even with some of the circle of friends who supported him. Among Blake’s later works are drawings and engravings for Dante’s Divine Comedy and the 21 illustrations to the book of Job, which was completed when he was almost 70 years old. Blake never managed to get out of poverty, in large part due to his inability to compete with fast engravers and his expensive invention that enabled him to design illustrations and print words at the same time.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/wblake.htm

Hell - Chosen Quotes

Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

I love the strength of this poem to me the tiger represents a fiery evil presence like the devil, I can see images of fire and smoke, power, dark forests and shadows.

I was walking among the fires of hell,
Delighted with the enjoyments of Genius,
Which to Angels look like torment and insanity

All night beneath the ruins;
Then, their sullen flames faded,
Emerge round the gloomy King.

Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secrecy the human dress.

The human dress is forged iron,
The human form a fiery forge,
The human face a furnace sealed,
The human heart its hungry gorge.

He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star

These poems for me are all about power, fire and anger, which I hope to represent in my final images

Literary Influence - Milton’s Paradise Lost

Milton’s Paradise Lost

I have chosen to use quotes from Milton’s Paradise Lost to use as inspiration for my images of heaven, because Milton creates such beautiful visions of heaven in particular that I want to perceive in my images. I find the book Paradise Lost to be very inspiring when thinking about life and death and the afterlife.



Paradise Lost

Milton’s magnum opus, the blank-verse epic poem Paradise Lost, which appeared in a quarto edition in 1667, was composed by the blind Milton from 1658-1664 through dictation given to a series of aides in his employ. It reflects his personal despair at the failure of the Revolution, yet affirms an ultimate optimism in human potential. Milton encoded many references to his unyielding support for the “Good Old Cause.”

Milton had abandoned his initial plan to compose an epic on Arthur, and instead turned to a Christian idea of heroism. Paradise Lost was first published in ten books in 1667, and then 12 books in 1674. Consisting of almost 11,000 lines, Milton adapts a number of classical epic conventions. Among these conventions is a focus on the elevated subjects of war, love, and heroism. In Book 6, Milton describes the battle between the banished angels, and the ones still in heaven. In the battle, the Son is invincible against Satan and his cohorts.

But Milton’s emphasis is less on the Son as a warrior and more on his love for humankind. The Father, in his celestial dialogue with the Son, foresees the sinfulness of Adam and Eve, and the Son chooses to become incarnate and to suffer humbly to redeem them. Though his role as saviour of fallen humankind is not enacted in the epic, Adam and Eve before their expulsion from Eden learn of the future redemptive ministry of Jesus, the exemplary gesture of self-sacrificing love.

The Son’s selfless love contrasts strikingly with the selfish love of the heroes of Classical epics, who are distinguished by their valour on the battlefield, which is usually incited by pride and vainglory. Their strength and skills on the battlefield and their acquisition of the spoils of war also issue from hate, anger, revenge, greed, and covetousness. If Classical epics deem their protagonists heroic for their extreme passions, even vices, the Son in Paradise Lost exemplifies Christian heroism both through his meekness and magnanimity and through his patience and fortitude.

It also begins in medias res. Book 1 starts in the aftermath of the war in heaven. Paradise Lost is not only about the downfall of Adam and Eve, but also of Satan and the Son. Satans traits reflect those of other epic heroes, like Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas. The Son, though, is more heroic, because of his love for humankind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Milton

Milton’s speaker begins Paradise Lost by stating that his
subject will be Adam and Eve’s disobedience and fall from grace. He invokes a heavenly muse and asks for help in relating his ambitious story and God’s plan for humankind. The action begins with Satan and his fellow rebel angels who are found chained to a lake of fire in Hell. They quickly free themselves and fly to land, where they discover minerals and construct Pandemonium, which will be their meeting place. Inside Pandemonium, the rebel angels, who are now devils, debate whether they should begin another war with God.

Beezlebub suggests that they attempt to corrupt God’s beloved new creation, humankind. Satan agrees, and volunteers to go himself. As he prepares to leave Hell, he is met at the gates by his children, Sin and Death, who follow him and build a bridge between Hell and Earth.

In Heaven, God orders the angels together for a council of their own. He tells them of Satan’s intentions, and the Son volunteers himself to make the sacrifice for humankind.

Meanwhile, Satan travels through Night and Chaos and finds Earth. He disguises himself as a cherub to get past the Archangel Uriel, who stands guard at the sun. He tells Uriel that he wishes to see and praise God’s glorious creation, and Uriel assents. Satan then lands on Earth and takes a moment to reflect. Seeing the splendor of Paradise brings him pain rather than pleasure.

He reaffirms his decision to make evil his good, and continue to commit crimes against God. Satan leaps over Paradise’s wall, takes the form of a cormorant (a large bird), and perches himself atop the Tree of Life. Looking down at Satan from his post, Uriel notices the volatile emotions reflected in the face of this so-called cherub and warns the other angels that an impostor is in their midst. The other angels agree to search the Garden for intruders.

Meanwhile, Adam and Eve tend the Garden, carefully obeying God’s supreme order not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. After a long day of work, they return to their bower and rest. There, Satan takes the form of a toad and whispers into Eve’s ear. Gabriel, the angel set to guard Paradise, finds Satan there and orders him to leave.

Satan prepares to battle Gabriel, but God makes a sign appear in the sky—the golden scales of justice—and Satan scurries away. Eve awakes and tells Adam about a dream she had, in which an angel tempted her to eat from the forbidden tree. Worried about his creation, God sends Raphael down to Earth to teach Adam and Eve of the dangers they face with Satan.

Raphael arrives on Earth and eats a meal with Adam and Eve. After the meal, Eve retires, allowing Raphael and Adam to speak alone. Raphael relates the story of Satan’s envy over the Son’s appointment as God’s second-in-command. Satan gathered other angels together who were also angry to hear this news, and together they plotted a war against God. Abdiel decides not to join Satan’s army and returns to God.

The angels then begin to fight, with Michael and Gabriel serving as co-leaders for Heaven’s army. The battle lasts two days, when God sends the Son to end the war and deliver Satan and his rebel angels to Hell. Raphael tells Adam about Satan’s evil motives to corrupt them, and warns Adam to watch out for Satan. Adam asks Raphael to tell him the story of creation. Raphael tells Adam that God sent the Son into Chaos to create the universe.

He created the earth and stars and other planets. Curious, Adam asks Raphael about the movement of the stars and planets. Raphael promptly warns Adam about his seemingly unquenchable search for knowledge. Raphael tells Adam that he will learn all he needs to know, and that any other knowledge is not meant for humans to comprehend.

Adam tells Raphael about his first memories, of waking up and wondering who he was, what he was, and where he was. Adam says that God spoke to him and told him many things, including his order not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. After the story, Adam confesses to Raphael his intense physical attraction to Eve. Raphael reminds Adam that he must love Eve more purely and spiritually. With this final bit of advice, Raphael leaves Earth and returns to Heaven.

Eight days after his banishment, Satan returns to Paradise. After closely studying the animals of Paradise, he chooses to take the form of the serpent. Meanwhile, Eve suggests to Adam that they work separately for awhile, so they can get more work done. Adam is hesitant but then assents. Satan searches for Eve and is delighted to find her alone. In the form of a serpent, he talks to Eve and compliments her on her beauty and godliness.

She is amazed to find an animal that can speak. She asks how he learned to speak, and he tells her that it was by eating from the Tree of Knowledge. He tells Eve that God actually wants her and Adam to eat from the tree, and that his order is merely a test of their courage. She is hesitant at first but then reaches for a fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and eats. She becomes distraught and searches for Adam. Adam has been busy making a wreath of flowers for Eve.

When Eve finds Adam, he drops the wreath and is horrified to find that Eve has eaten from the forbidden tree. Knowing that she has fallen, he decides that he would rather be fallen with her than remain pure and lose her. So he eats from the fruit as well. Adam looks at Eve in a new way, and together they turn to lust.

God immediately knows of their disobedience. He tells the angels in Heaven that Adam and Eve must be punished, but with a display of both justice and mercy. He sends the Son to give out the punishments. The Son first punishes the serpent whose body Satan took, and condemns it never to walk upright again. Then the Son tells Adam and Eve that they must now suffer pain and death. Eve and all women must suffer the pain of childbirth and must submit to their husbands, and Adam and all men must hunt and grow their own food on a depleted Earth.

Meanwhile, Satan returns to Hell where he is greeted with cheers. He speaks to the devils in Pandemonium, and everyone believes that he has beaten God. Sin and Death travel the bridge they built on their way to Earth. Shortly thereafter, the devils unwillingly transform into snakes and try to reach fruit from
imaginary trees that shrivel and turn to dust as they reach them.

God tells the angels to transform the Earth. After the fall, humankind must suffer hot and cold seasons instead of the consistent temperatures before the fall. On Earth, Adam and Eve fear their approaching doom. They blame each other for their disobedience and become increasingly angry at one another. In a fit of rage, Adam wonders why God ever created Eve. Eve begs Adam not to abandon her. She tells him that they can survive by loving each other.

She accepts the blame because she has disobeyed both God and Adam. She ponders suicide. Adam, moved by her speech, forbids her from taking her own life. He remembers their punishment and believes that they can enact revenge on Satan by remaining obedient to God. Together they pray to God and repent.

God hears their prayers, and sends Michael down to Earth. Michael arrives on Earth, and tells them that they must leave Paradise. But before they leave, Michael puts Eve to sleep and takes Adam up onto the highest hill, where he shows him a vision of humankind’s future. Adam sees the sins of his children, and his children’s children, and his first vision of death.

Horrified, he asks Michael if there is any alternative to death. Generations to follow continue to sin by lust, greed, envy, and pride. They kill each other selfishly and live only for pleasure. Then Michael shows him the vision of Enoch, who is saved by God as his warring peers attempt to kill him.

Adam also sees the story of Noah and his family, whose virtue allows them to be chosen to survive the flood that kills all other humans. Adam feels remorse for death and happiness for humankind’s redemption. Next is the vision of Nimrod and the Tower of Babel. This story explains the perversion of pure language into the many languages that are spoken on Earth today.

Adam sees the triumph of Moses and the Israelites, and then glimpses the Son’s sacrifice to save humankind. After this vision, it is time for Adam and Eve to leave Paradise. Eve awakes and tells Adam that she had a very interesting and educating dream. Led by Michael, Adam and Eve slowly and woefully leave Paradise hand in hand into a new world.

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/paradiselost/summary.html


Heaven - Chosen Quotes

I found these beautiful quotes all about heaven that I will use to illustrate my images, they talke about spiritual creatures, angels, grace, love and a path leading to light, which are all very inspiring for me to use as inspiration to my final five images.

What if earth be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein each to other like, more than on earth is thought?

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep.

In heaven by many a tower’d structure high, where scepter’d angels held their residence

Grace was in all her steps,
Heaven in her eye,
In every gesture dignity and love.

Long is the way and hard, that out of hell leads up to light.

Literary Influence - Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

The themes of life and death have inspired writers and poets for many years. I have decided to read and research some of the most famous literature found on these subjects to then inspire my final 25 images. I will illustrate the various pieces of writing I find on these subjects

My Final Series of images will inspired by the writing of Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Milton and Dante. I have chosen 25 poems/ quotes to illustrate in the final images, I have chosen them for the themes they portray so they tie in with the themes of my project.


My images will have strong influences from Christianity but not entirely as I have beliefs from many religions and my final images will be a mixture of all beliefs and will combine to form my own religion Edenias.

Emily Dickinson mainly wrote poems on the themes of life and death, i am a very big fan of the beautiful imagery created within her words.

‘Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. After she studied at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she spent a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family’s house in Amherst. Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence.

Dickinson was a prolific private poet; fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson’s poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often utilize slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation.

Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two subjects which infused her letters to friends.

Although most of her acquaintances were probably aware of Dickinson’s writing, it was not until after her death in 1886 when Lavinia, Emily’s younger sister, discovered her cache of poems that the breadth of Dickinson’s work became apparent. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890.

A complete and mostly unaltered collection of her poetry became available for the first time in 1955 when The Poems of Emily Dickinson was published by scholar Thomas H. Johnson. Despite unfavourable reviews and scepticism of her literary prowess during the late 19th and early 20th century, critics now consider Dickinson to be a major American poet. Early influences and writing when she was eighteen, Dickinson’s family befriended a young attorney by the name of Benjamin Franklin Newton.

According to a letter written by Dickinson after Newton’s death, he had been “with my Father two years, before going to Worcester in pursuing his studies, and was much in our family.” Although their relationship was probably not romantic, Newton was a formative influence and would become the second in a series of older men (after Humphrey) that Dickinson referred to variously as her tutor, preceptor or master.

Newton likely introduced her to the writings of William Wordsworth, and his gift to her of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first book of collected poems had a liberating effect. She wrote later that he, “Whose name my Father’s Law Student taught me, has touched the secret Spring”. Newton held her in high regard, believing in and recognizing her as a poet. When he was dying of tuberculosis, he wrote to her, saying that he would like to live until she achieved the greatness he foresaw. Biographers believe that Dickinson’s statement of 1862—”When a little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me Immortality – but venturing too near, himself – he never returned”—refers to Newton.

Dickinson was familiar not only with the Bible but also with contemporary popular literature. Dickinson was probably influenced by Lydia Maria Child’s Letters from New York, another gift from Newton (after reading it, she enthused “This then is a book! And there are more of them!”). Her brother smuggled a copy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Kavanagh into the house for her (because her father might disapprove) and a friend lent her Bronte’s Jane Eyre in late 1849.

Jane Eyre’s influence cannot be measured, but when Dickinson acquired her first and only dog, a Newfoundland, she named him Carlo after the character St. John Rivers’ dog. William Shakespeare was a potent influence in her life. Referring to his plays, she wrote to one friend “Why clasp any hand but this?” and to another “Why is any other book needed?”’

- Wikipedia, Emily Dickinson



I have chosen to use her poems for the theme of Life and also Death as a great deal of her poems are on these topics. I carefully selected ones that i love in particular and sum up life and death to me.

Life - Chosen Poems

I am alive I guess
The Branches on my Hand
Are full of Morning Glory
And at my fingers end

I love this poem as it makes me think of trees, which to me are a true symbol of life.

Nature sometimes sears a Sapling
Sometimes scalps a Tree
Her Green People recollect it
When they do not die

Again I like this poem as it talks about saplings, which are the beginning of life. When I read these poems I start to get visions in my head of what the images will look like

The Carmine tingles warm
And if I hold a Glass
Across my Mouth it blurs it
Physician’s proof of Breath

This poem to me is about the things that mean we are alive, blood, breathe and I love the way it uses imagery of some ones breathe mark on a glass to represent life.

Her face was in a bed of hair,
Like flowers in a plot
Her hand was whiter than the sperm
That feeds the sacred light.
Her tongue more tender than the tune
That totters in the leaves
Who hears may be incredulous,
Who witnesses, believes.

An image for me that represents life is the mother Mary and the immaculate conception, the image of her holding a baby. as birth is the beginning of human life. This poem to me is talking about the mother Mary and the sacred light that surrounds her.

How good to be alive
How infinite to be
Alive two-fold
The Birth I had
And this besides, in Thee!

Finally when I read this poem, I think of life and birth and a great warm feeling that is to be alive.

Death- Chosen Poems

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
For his civility
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too

This poem is so visual, I can see a huge carriage with Death at the reins.

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.
And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.
And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll
As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.

Death is a Dialogue
Between the Spirit and the Dust.
“Dissolve” says Death—The Spirit “Sir
I have another Trust”—

Death doubts it—Argues from the Ground—
The Spirit turns away
Just laying off for evidence
An Overcoat of Clay.

I absolutely love this poem! I can visualise someone who has just died and death in conversation

I died for beauty but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
“For beauty,” I replied.
“And I for truth, the two are one;
We brethren are,” he said.
And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

This to me shows death in a beautiful way as if when you die you join with nature

LET down the bars, O Death!
The tired flocks come in
Whose bleating ceases to repeat,
Whose wandering is done.

Thine is the stillest night,
Thine the securest fold;
Too near thou art for seeking thee,
Too tender to be told.

www.edenias.com

Today I created a website for the project, of course the site is temporary in existence as of yet it has no content. Its proper release will be at the beginning of December when all images will be complete

www.edenias.com

I Went to university again today, we looked at images and chatted about inspirations which was great as I've come away in a very inspirational mood.

I'm ready to spend the day creating a day by day plan of everything I will do over the next 6 months in order to keep to schedule with the project.

Over the next few days I will be looking for inspirations of all kinds and start researching the influences I have already touched on

My Life For the Next 6 Months

June
Find Inspirations/ Research

Mon 1 – Briefing for Project,
Set up blog www.edenias.blogspot.com
Tues 2 – Set up Workbook
Wed 3 – Research
Thurs 4 – Work Studio 10 - 6
Fri 5 - Research
Sat 6 – Work at Studio 9-5
Sun 7 - Planning Project
Mon 8 - Discussion Contemporary Fashion Photography
Tues 9 - Research/ Inspiration - Poets
Wed 10 - Research/ Inspiration Photographers
Thurs 11 – Work at Studio 10 - 6
Fri 12 - Research/ Inspiration Writers
Sat 13 – Work at Studio 9-5
Sun 14 – Research/ Inspiration Artists
Mon 15 – Tutorial
Tues 16 – Research/ Inspiration Fashion Designers
Wed 17 – Research/ Inspiration Films
Thurs 18 – Work at Studio 10 - 6
Fri 19 – Shoot Jons Wedding
Sat 20 – Work at Studio 9-5
Sun 21 – Retouch Jons Wedding
Mon 22 – Choose Casting for Shoots
Tues 23 – Choose Casting for Shoots
Wed 24 - Glastonbury
Thurs 25 - Glastonbury
Fri 26 - Glastonbury
Sat 27 - Glastonbury
Sun 28 - Glastonbury
Mon 29 - Glastonbury
Tues 30 – Day Off

July
Sketch Ideas for Each Shoot

Wed 1 – Sketch Ideas for Shoot One
Thurs 2 – Work atStudio 10 - 6
Fri 3 – Ideas/ Research for shoot
Sat 4 – Take Photos at Kofe Wedding
Sun 5 – Work at Studio 9-5, Edit Kofe Wedding
Mon 6 – Edit Kofe Wedding
Tues 7 –Sketch Ideas for Shoot Two
Wed 8 – Sketch Ideas for Shoot Three
Thurs 9 – Work at Studio 10 – 6
Fri 10 - Amsterdam
Sat 11 - Amsterdam
Sun 12 - Amsterdam
Mon 13 - Amsterdam
Tues 14 – Day Off
Wed 15 – List All Props Needed for Shoots
Thurs 16 – Work at Studio 10 – 6
Fri 17 – Sketch Ideas for Shoot Five
Sat 18 - Work at Studio 9-5
Sun 19 – List All Props Needed for Shoots
Mon 20 – List All Props Needed for Shoots
Tues 21 – List All Props Needed for Shoots
Wed 22 – List All Props Needed for Shoots
Thurs 23 – Work at Studio 10 – 6
Fri 24 – List All Props Needed for Shoots
Sat 25 – Take Photos at Alan’s Wedding
Sun 26 – Retouch Alan’s wedding
Mon 27 – Retouch Alan’s wedding
Tues 28 – Retouch Shoot
Wed 29 – Retouch Shoot
Thurs 30 – Work at Studio 10 – 6
Fri 30 - Retouch Shoot

August
Cast each shoot and arrange 5 photoshoots

Sat 1 – Work at Studio 9 – 5
Sun 2 – Day Off
Mon 3 – Contact Teams
Tues 4 - List 100 Magazines
Wed 5 - Contact Teams
Thurs 6 – Work at Studio 10 – 6
Fri 7 - Contact Teams
Sat 8 – Sam’s wedding
Sun 9 – Work at Studio 9-5
Mon 10 – Edit Sams wedding
Tues 11 – Contact Teams
Wed 12 – Contact Teams
Thurs 13 – Work at Studio 10 – 6
Fri 14 – Contact Teams
Sat 15 – Work at Studio 9-5
Sun 16 – Contact Teams
Mon 17 – Contact Teams
Tues 18 – Contact Teams
Wed 19 – Contact Teams
Thurs 20 – Work at Studio 10 – 6
Fri 21 – Contact Teams
Sat 22 – Work at Studio 9-5
Sun 23 - Contact Teams
Mon 24 – Contact Teams
Tues 25 – Contact Teams
Wed 26 – Contact Teams
Thurs 27 – Work at Studio 10 – 6
Fri 28 – Contact Teams
Sat 29 – Work at Studio 9-5
Sun 30 - Contact Teams
Mon 31 - Contact Teams

September
Shooting/ Retouching

Tues 1 - Contact Teams/ Source Props
Wed 2 - Contact Teams/ Source Props
Thurs 3 – Work at Studio 10-6
Fri 4 - Contact Teams/ Source Props
Sat 5 – Work at Studio 9-5, Hen Night
Sun 6 – Day Off
Mon 7 – Prepare for my wedding
Tues 8 – Prepare for my wedding
Wed 9 – Prepare for my wedding
Thurs 10 – My Wedding
Fri 11 – Honey Moon
Sat 12 – Honey Moon
Sun 13 – Honey Moon
Mon 14 – Honey Moon
Tues 15 – Honey Moon
Wed 16 – Honey Moon
Thurs 17 – Honey Moon
Fri 18 – Honey Moon
Sat 19 – Take Photos at Jolene’s Wedding
Sun 20 - Work at Studio 10-6
Mon 21 – Prepare for Shoot
Tues 22 – Prepare for Shoot
Wed 23 – Prepare for Shoot
Thurs 24 – Work at Studio 10-6
Fri 25 – Prepare for Shoot
Sat 26 – Work at Studio 9-5
Sun 27 – SHOOT ONE - LIFE
Mon 28 – Retouch Shoot
Tues 29 – Retouch Shoot
Wed 30 – Work at Venture 10 – 6

October
Shooting/ Retouching

Thurs 1 – Work at Studio 10-6
Fri 2– Shop Images to Magazines
Sat 3 – Work at Studio 9-5
Sun 4 - Prepare for Shoot
Mon 5 - Prepare for Shoot
Tues 6 - Prepare for Shoot
Wed 7 - Prepare for Shoot
Thurs 8 – Work at Studio 10-6
Fri 9 – Prepare for Shoot
Sat 10 – Work at Studio 9-5
Sun 11 – SHOOT TWO DEATH
Mon 12 – Retouch Shoot
Tues 13 – Retouch Shoot
Wed 14 – Retouch Shoot
Thurs 15 – Work at Studio 10-6
Fri 16 – Shop Images to Magazines
Sat 17 – Work at Studio 9-5
Sun 18 – Prepare for Shoot
Mon 19 – Prepare for Shoot
Tues 20 – Prepare for Shoot
Wed 21 – Prepare for Shoot
Thurs 22 – Work at Studio 10-6
Fri 23 Prepare for Shoot
Sat 24 – Work at Studio 9-5
Sun 25 – SHOOT THREE HEAVEN
Mon 26 – Retouch Shoot
Tues 27 – Retouch Shoot
Wed 28 – Retouch Shoot
Thurs 29 – Work at Studio 10-6
Fri 30 - Shop Images to Magazines
Sat 31 – Work at Studio 9-5

November
Shooting/ Retouching

Sun 1 - Prepare for Shoot
Mon 2 - Prepare for Shoot
Tues 3 -Prepare for Shoot
Wed 4 - Prepare for Shoot
Thurs 5 – Work at Studio 10-6
Fri 6 – Prepare for Shoot
Sat 7 – Work at Studio 9-5
Sun 8 – SHOOT FOUR HELL
Mon 9 – Retouch Shoot
Tues 10 – Retouch Shoot
Wed 11 – Retouch Shoot
Thurs 12– Work at Studio 10-6
Fri 13 – Shop Images to Magazines
Sat 14 – Work at Studio 9-5
Sun 15 – Prepare for Shoot
Mon 16 – Prepare for Shoot
Tues 17 – Prepare for Shoot
Wed 18 –Prepare for Shoot
Thurs 19– Work at Studio 10-6
Fri 20 – Prepare for Shoot
Sat 21 – Work at Studio 9-5
Sun 22– SHOOT FIVE REINCARNATION
Mon 23– Retouch Shoot
Tues 24 – Retouch Shoot
Wed 25 – Retouch Shoot
Thurs 26– Shop Images to Magazines
Fri 27 – Finish Workbook/ Report
Sat 28 – Work at Studio 9-5, Finish Workbook/ Report
Sun 29 – Finish Workbook/ Report
Mon 30 – Get Workbook Printed
Get 25 Prints From Photobox

December
Printing and Book Binding

Tues 1 – Make Website
Wed 2 – Pick Up Printing to get bound
Thurs 3– Work at Studio 10 – 6
Fri 4 – Pick up Work and Hand in Project by 4pm

Briefing

We were briefed yesterday Monday 1st June on our final project, we are to produce a 5,000 word assignment to show our developments through the project to hand in on the 4th December 2009.

I will also produce a A4 workbook to show all my reserach, inspirations and idea sketches for the shoot

I will also produce an a4 book with all the contact sheets from the 5 shoots I will do, with a selection of unretouched images and then the final selection as unretouched and retouched images side by side.

Finally I will print out the final images as a hardback book and as 25 prints

My website www.edenias.com will also feature the final images

I also intend to get the images published in as many magazines as possible to attempt to publise them to the world.

Edenias: MA Fashion Photography - LCF

Well, its finally here, my final major project. I have chosen my title and now have a good 7 months to work on it. Im very excited about producing a set of images to exhibit at the Mall Gallery early next year and look forward to researching this topic that has always fascinated me

Edenias – ‘Life & Death’

www.edenias.com

Rationale

“A person has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it, and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.”
- D. H. Lawrence

Edenias is my religion, you will not understand this word until my project is complete, Infact at this stage it doesn’t even exist but by the end of it all, you will see my belief and the self discovery of my beliefs in a series of images showing my philosophy on life, death and reincarnation. Through my imagination you will understand my belief, which at this stage is still Infact a mystery to me.

“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.
What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion. Is there any sense then, you ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.”

- Albert Einstein

Throughout my life I have battled with belief, ideas on life and death and then what happens to us after we die. I have had to deal with the fact that whilst I believe in the fantasy, romanticism, illusion and imagination of these things, I don’t have any set belief on if any of these things are in fact real. When it comes down to the big question that seems to plague all of humanity which is ‘Is there a God? Like the rest of us I simply don’t know.

I think of religion as pretence something that tears humanity apart and while it enriches the lives of some it causes pain to others. I don’t believe in set rules and dogmas of some religions on what really people have no proof of. I do however take from all kinds of religions things that make sense to me and in my final images they will show to the world my view on what I think life is about, what happens when we die and the reincarnation of the soul.

My images will be beautiful concepts of how I envisage these things inside my own mind. My own religion is in fact made up of many fragments of Christianity, Buddhism, Catholism, Atheism, and Darwinism.

Life and death being one of the biggest questions within the human race has questioned our world since the beginning of time and it is a subject that predominantly interests me. My work in the past has always been about the contrasts between life and death, darkness and light, heaven and hell, beauty and convulsion and I want to carry on the theme of contrasts in my final project.

I have constant visions inside my head of what these things would be like, these illusions fuelled by the literature I have read and the images I have seen in my life. I love that so many people have created beautiful visions of what these things are like and it inspires me to create my own images based on these themes, simply because really all we can do is imagine.

I will be inspired in each of my images by the great creative’s that have come before me and the multitude of religions and beliefs about this theme. Each image I take will illustrate poetry I have read about life and death by poets such as Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickenson and William Blake.

Because fashion is of great importance to me on this journey I want to tie in the fashion I use in the shots to the themes. So for example when representing death I will deconstruct garments, for life I will use light or bright white in the fashion, reincarnation I could reuse vintage garments. I will carefully select the fashion and work with designers to create something specific for the shots.

I find it of great interest and that fashion itself runs aside these themes, fashion lives, fashion dies, there is fashion hell and fashion heaven and it does indeed reincarnate itself again and again. In vintage items

"Fashion must die and die quickly, in order that it can begin to live"

-- Coco Chanel

"Fashion mocks death"

-- Philosopher Walter Benjamin

Aims

It is my main aim to expose the series of 25 images in as many ways as possible in the public space; I want to get them on the internet, create a book of the images, get them published in different magazines and to create an exhibition.

Objectives

1 I will examine the theme of life and death; I will see what these things mean to humanity and how humans feel about these things. There are so many beliefs about these subjects that really interest me. At the end of the project I will have a greater understanding about the theme of life and death and what it means to the human race

2) I will investigate what the notion of life and death can mean in fashion and the design of clothing and how these themes can be represented in the clothing. By exploring this it will give me a greater understanding of the fashion world and lead me to make some discoveries regarding fashion designers who create designs while being inspired by the life of clothes, the death of clothing, fashion hell and heaven and the reincarnation of fashion from previous periods in time.

3) I will learn more about the process of a photoshoot, from idea to the finished images ready for print. By the end of the project I will have a bigger knowledge on what it takes to be a fashion photographer and the elements needed to organise a shoot ready for editorial.

4) In my shots I want to create more energy and emotion behind them, in this period of self discovery in my chosen subject I will learn how to plan a shot and how to direct the model/ styling to create a story behind the images full of meaning, passion and emotion.

5) The final images will be a set of my visions on the themes of life and death as I don’t fit myself into any religion as such. They will form the collective of my beliefs into my own religion Edenias.

Proposed Outcomes

I will create a series of 25 images, over 5 fashion stories that I will get published in 5 different magazines. My target magazines will be the more conceptual/ arty fashion magazines like Dazed and Confused/ Vogue Italia as these magazines are more open to more experimental styles of fashion photography, as I aim for my images to be highly conceptual.

I will create a website to promote the 25 images from the shoot called www.edenias.com

Also a blog that will follow my progress throughout the project www.edenias.blogspot.com

I will create a book of 25 images. The book will be a conceptual/ art photography book targeted at adults who love beautiful, dark and thoughtful photography

Finally I will create an exhibition of to show the 25 images. These images will conceptualise my theory on life and death.

Plan

I will do my research and planning in May and June and then one shoot a month until November, within each month I will research, plan, sketch, discuss with team members, shoot, retouch and then shop the images to magazines.

About Me

I have been working as a professional photographer for three years after completing my 1st degree in Graphic Design in June 2006.


After working as a full time portrait photographer for 2 years I decieded to go back to study and started my masters degree in fashion photographer at the london College of Fashion in September 2008.

I have been doing a number of fashion photography based projects over the last few months and have enjoyed the freedom of working with many teams of people and creating some beautiful images. The images I have taken so far on my degree have been developing my style and as I hope to improve on what I have done on my masters so far I will hope to develop the style of these images.

Term One: Union Black Project - To produce an impactful series of fashion images to show the beauty of black and white in Britain


Term Two: Alice in Wonderland Project Part One - Fashion story to illustrate Alice in Wonderland








Term Two: Alice in Wonderland Project Part Two - Conceptual Fashion images to illustate a bizzare version of Alice in Wonderland







Term One/ Two: Lyrics Project Part One - Using the lyrics to create a fashion series







Term One/ Two: Lyrics Project Part Two - Using the lyrics to create a fashion series








Term One/ Two: Contextual Studies






I am now about to embark on my final MA project which I am very excited about. I am looking forward to spending these months developing the style of my other projects, my biggest aim to be able to create life, enegergy, passion and meaning in my images.