Laurence Demaison

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I remember that after the call, I didn’t know what to do, so I took a long, hot bath. But it didn’t last too long—there was work to do! The HSBC team is incredibly efficient and competent and kind. It was such a pleasure to work with them in such wonderful and professional conditions. Such conditions are rare. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them again and again.. I took these set of images each time I gave one of my dogs a treat. I think that these images are quite amusing mainly from the angle at which all the images were taken. From the high birds eye angle each time my dogs would wait for their treat, they would look up at the treat, which meant that the artificial lighting in the room would create a reflection in their eyes. From this and the way the dogs were sitting, it created a very innocent feeling towards the dogs. One way I could have improved these images, would have been by including the food for the dogs in the image, to make it more obvious what the dogs were looking at, as well as this I think by including the dog food it would've made the images more comedic as the viewers would be able to see what the dogs were staring at.

Refusant la facilité de Photoshop, le photographe construit patiemment ses mises en scènes, avec une grande exigence formelle. Dotées d’une forte charge symbolique, ses photographies sont autant de paraboles - volontiers dérangeantes - sur la condition humaine, nourries d’empathie et d’ironie. I would like to explore creating more abstract images, through further experimentation, using the set of images I have just created in my final outcomes. I want to do this as I really want my project to emphasise on textures and tones and after looking at this set of images, I realise that they include these two themes repeatedly in each image. The photographic work of Laurence Demaison is exclusively constituted by self-portraits from 1993 to 2009. Since 2010 she occasionally uses mannequins or dolls. The used techniques – shot, development, print – are analogicals and realized by the author. No particular manipulation intervenes beyond the shot (except chemical inversion of films for some series)Son travail photographique en noir et blanc reflète l'angoisse, la destruction et la question de l'identité. Il n'est pas question d'approcher le réel mais de l'interroger, et l'artiste réalise de véritables performances afin d'aboutir au cliché voulu (transformations corporelles, installations, durées de pose inhabituelles…). Originally, Demaison worked with a model, but she eventually began taking photos only of herself, partly to limit expenses. “She doesn’t feel that they’re self-portraits at all,” notes Bernard Gerson, director of Galerie BMG. “They’re not about her. She’s using the reflecting and distorting qualities of the water or the glossy paper to make phantoms, ghosts of herself. She disappears from the image.”

The image I am going to annotate is the one on the right. These series of photographs known as the Petites Bulles are eye capturing. Though particularly the photo on the right I am drawn to. This photographshows a portrait of a person that is distortional with water. My eye is specially drawn to the many bubbles that frame the image. Furthermore I really enjoy that the base image of the photo is still visible. He uses many composition styles, one I really like is that the bubbles are acting as many irregular frames. They have focused the camera in the middle. But what I do love is the different shapes and looks of texture on the bubbles; which causes your eye to never stop in one place for to long. As the viewer would want to take in the whole photo by Laurence. My favourite images are the top and bottom right photos. This is because tey are the most simplistic out of the set, but still get through the textures and tones I was focusing for. Furthermore because of this, the original pictures are still unrecognisable. This experiment has made me want to layer my images in different ways, such as double exposure, or layering the images by printing images on top of each other.I decided to edit my images even more, as I realised that the formal elements I wanted to show in my images could be emphasised even more with heavier editing. Using iPhoto again, I turned my brightness down more on the images and exaggerated the contrast even more. I think this helped blend the body with the location together, as well as emphasising the tones and textures in the images, which I have always liked about the effect.I followed Brandt's theme, by photographing the body and also the location of the photograph Throughout this course we have been given a chance to add on coursework we may have missed. For me, I thought that it would be good to revisit some of my writing a year later and date it here, which will further show my improvement within this course. However, on saying this, i am going to leave my year ten coursework due to the reasoning my writing has improved. So below is a short write up continuing from my artist investigation - Laurence Demaision.