Damien Blottiere
Damien Blottiere is a visual artist who graduated from the Parisian school Duppere, living and working in Paris. His journey as an artist began as a fashion editor for Mixte, Purple Fashion before devoting himself to his own work.
Initially, the most prevalent emotion that is evoked from Damien Blottiere's work is a sense of intrigue caused by the almost alien nature of his work. Furthermore because of the artists use of layering of images in order to create new forms, the work also evokes awe within the onlooker at the various forms that the artist has created.
Within Blottiere's work, the most prominent characteristic of his physical pieces is his manipulation of the the different pieces in order to create a distortion of the human form. performed primarily within the greyscale. Drexler has accomplished this in many differing ways and incorporated many different techniques. Some examples of this are the way in which he has created forms of humans, creating a layer mask in order to only expose the image which fits the frame he creates, Additionally, he has also made it so that he has taken several images of the same face from different angles, and then fitting them all into one original photograph, and he also goes onto use different media such as what I can only assume to be either some form of paint or other slimy substance that he has bought. His insistence to create work only within the greyscale makes it so that they appear to be more professional that should they have been in full colour, as it would be much to similar to modern day photography, and I believe it only exemplifies the photographs surreal nature, which is also brought about by the obvious intricacy and abundance of different lines, shapes and forms.
It seems as though, within this work, Blottiere has used a faster shutter speed and lower aperture as his subject appears to be in full clarity and there is no evidence of there being any background that would have been in any sort of detail, however it is clear that he has not made use of a slower ISO in order to create a texture. Most of his work is leaning further towards the overexposed rather than underexposed, which might seem unnatural due to his colour scheme however this does not make it so that his pieces are unsuccessful, it might have even made it so that they stand out more than they otherwise would have. He has also made it so that whilst he can sometimes have an abundance of negative space, the way in which the work has a very complicated composition, or his manipulation of different shapes and lines allow the work to still be successful.
Damien Blottiere deformation of the human form, morphing a persons entire body and face, that whhich defines ones physical identity , makes it so that the work he presents has a new sort of meaning because despite this they are still recognisable as human beings, which could be a message that he is trying to portray through his work cliche as it might be. I find this work to be strangely comforting despite its confusing nature, I also find it greatly intriguing because of the use of intricate shapes which make Blottiere's work more interesting.
This will be helpful when I am attempting my photoshoot because it has given me the necessary guidelines to ensure that my work can be as similar to the artists work, whilst remaining in a way my own. In saying this, the guidelines are not there to restrict me and so I will still allow myself to bend them in order to allow for some form of experimentation.
For this photoshoot, my aim was to take images wearing different clothes, all from different angles and some in different orientations, so that when it would come to editing my images in the style of Damien Blottiere, i would have an abundance of differing perspectives to utilise in order to make my work more successful than it otherwhise would have been.
First developments
For these edits I added a layer of colour to my raw images and then changed the blending option, the exposure and contrast, alongside inverting the images in order to get the results shown above. If I were to repeat this as I probably will, I would ensure that the background of the images to remain the same colour rather than the black which is so prominent in the final two images.
Highlighting success
These are my most successful edits. I decided this from the fact that these are the images where I believe the colours and levels chosen best suit the image once it has been inversed, furthermore as they contain a shade of their colour as a background rather than a dark maroon such as in some of the other images, I believe this makes it possible to call these images my most successful pieces of work from my first developments.
Physical
Developments
These are physical works where I decided too take my first developments, print them off and create different images from them physically. In the process of making my first one, I came to the realisation that they would probably look better if they were elevated, so it was obvious that there were different levels and layers. After doing this I realised that if you look at them front on, or from far away, then even with the cardboard separating the layers, it was hard to distinguish the different levels and so when it came to taking the images, I thought that I should take them from different perspectives to make the work I had done more obvious and pronounced.
Highlighting Success
These are my best photographs of my physical work, and the most successful of the physical work. This is because the angles I used for the first images were the ones that showed the different levels the best, and the work in the first image was also my most complicated as whist each piece is separate from each other, I also introduced differing levels within the same thing, which was not as obvious as I thought it would be and ended up not being visible. With the second piece of work, I believe it was successful because of its simplicity, as despite not having many different focuses and being quite a piece, It still felt to better than the others. One of the things that made this whole process successful on a whole I find was my use of the vibrant, complimenting colours which makes these developments much more striking.
Physical Development Edits
For these developments, I experimented with the hue, saturation and the selective colour levels in order to change the lighting and the colours in the image that I thought could be improved upon. I realised that for many of the images, not matter what I would try to do with them, the changes would detract from the pieces, success and so I ended up not editing many of the images for the flatter pieces, instead focusing on the ones where there were more distinct levels.