Objective Portraits.

Produce a series of three objective portrait in the studio which are identically lit, framed and exposed, using a medium format film camera.

Objectivism: step back from the photo, to not be emotionally involved, it can be found in documents because it tells people the truth.

Photographers: Thomas Ruff, August Sander, Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Artist: Thomas Ruff.

Ruff is a German photographer, he studied at the art school in Dusseldorf Germany. He works in series each body of work makes us of different image making techniques. Ruff gets his style of work from Bernd and Hilla Becher, they taught him at the school and he followed their style of objective photography.

Ruffs portraits have a total of 60 frontal identically frames, lit and exposed images of expressionless men and women, that are in a passport style, these photos are of his friends and colleagues. They are printed in large scale and are the lengths of walls at galleries. They reveal every surface detail of their subject, the portraits don't show anything beyond what you can see. Ruffs portraits are objective photos style as they document what you can se and nothing else.

Write Up:

For my final images I had to produce three portraits in the style of Thomas Ruff, same lighting, same exposer, same background and the same facial expression, using medium format cameras.

I shot two rolls of film, the first roll I shared with Jack and the second roll I shared with Jack, Elisa and Enniya. We had to develop the rolls of film in the dark room to see the photos we had taken. Next I created contact sheets for both rolls of film as it made things easier to see what photos I wanted to use for my final three images, I ended up using the second roll of film where I picked photos of Jack, Elisa and Ennyia. When making these photos in the dark room I used 4 second exposer, 11 light and 25 magenta, the magenta makes the whites whiter and the blacks darker.

I like the images I produced because you can tell that they are influenced by Thomas Ruff, everyone has the same expression in these photos, the lighting is the same, exposer and also the background. Also they are in an objective style of photography meaning that you can’t see beyond what the photo shows you, you can’t see if they are happy or sad because they have an emotionless expression on their face all you can see is what is in front if you. Thomas Ruff used a white background where as I used a black one, I did this because it makes the image look more mysterious as you can’t see beyond and it looks like the person is surrounded by darkness.

If i had time to do something like this again i would do something completely different, i would create images that are more subjective and fun, i would do this because it shows who the person is rather then just what you can see, i think this would be better because you can tell what type of person they are rather than guessing because all you can see is the way they look. Another way to progress forward with this is to have two completely different people and do a shot with both of them at different times, i would do this to show that not everyone is the same and that different people act different, one person could be more confident then the other, one person could have a completely different personality then the other so i would have to figure out a different way to show them as a person.