David LaChepelle

David LaChepelle was describes as the first person to ‘make photography modern’ and pushes the boundaries in his work as well as incorporating travelling the world to photograph his subjects. He currently lives and works in New York where he has photographed many celebrities in his career with inspiration from Andy Warhol and his work in popular culture which interests LaChepelle so much and inspires his work which you can see as his images are contemporary, surreal and sexy.

He came from a small town where he didn’t feel that he fitted in and felt that there was no other option but to go to New York where being different was celebrated. He went to an art school where he met Andy Warhol and got a photography job with his where his aim was to make everyone look good and also worked for magazines such as “Time Vogue” and “Vanity Affair”. He has input in every aspect of his images from hair and make up to lighting and fashion before experimenting to try and produce an image that hasn’t been made before.

He naturally crosses the art and fashion genres and makes a statement by having fun with his photos and subjects as well as thinking up many ideas and working with a team to construct images and backdrops. His mum first introduced him to photography as she used to use it as an escape to produce pictures that look better than the subject actually was and after 8/10 years of professional shooting including weddings, David LaChepelle changed his approach and considered himself as a conceptual photographer. Some of his projects are such large scale that it can take up to 2 days to complete a shoot and money is not a limit with collaborations with different artists helping to produce the back drops and sets.

Celebrities are aware of LaChepelle’s work and many want to be photographed by him as he goes the extra mile to make them feel comfortable, for example, by playing music on set as some of his shoots are very outgoing as he gets ideas from researching other artists and running ideas past the client for them to choose which they like the best.

“The easy part is taking all of the pictures. Putting it all together and pulling off the shoot is the hardest bit.”

LaChepelle likes to see people in his images look beautiful and sexy as you can tell a lot about a person from how far they are willing to go with a shoot in a way that doesn’t harm the person’s career. The people in his images are portrayed as larger than life so you never really know what you’re going to get with no repetition in his work. His images are described as highly polished with the colours being bright, rich, full on and saturated without over doing the post production and trying to get the right balance; he tries to achieve perfection when the image is taken and not in post production.

He never thought that his images would be shown in a gallery as he only ever aimed for them to be in magazines. He believes that the purpose of art is to make people think and his goal is to photograph people that show this and other people that make up the world of popular culture.

He has now moved on to other experimental areas of work such as music videos, which are darker and more serious although they are still heart felt. 

Kid Acne

Kid Acne is a Sheffield based artist who started off designing album covers for record labels during the time that he was studying fine art and later graphics and illustrating. He produces commissioned work as well as graffiti on boarded up houses, making his own music and creating comic strips called ‘Zebra Face’.

He likes to listen to other people’s conversations as inspiration for his work as he illustrates them and then produced all of the images that he created in to a book, which told many peoples stories. More recently, he has been producing work for clubs designing and producing flyers for them to use as promotion for the club itself as well as specific theme nights as well as producing designs for Levi’s where his work was shown all around Europe. He has also designed t-shirts for Prada who took a lot of control over the content of the work as they had a clear idea of what they wanted whereas smaller companies allowed him to work more freely and design what he wanted to. He also designed a small collection of jumpers for friends and hand crafted before being shown in a gallery exhibition as a one off.

Although he is interested in fantasy art, he has also experimented with photography, which has taught him a lot of techniques and skills. All of his work is still hand drawn and scanned in to a computer, not produced digitally on a computer as he chose not to learn how to use Illustrator or Indesign, and has then been made in to books several times to help promote his work.

Acne’s favourite place to display his work is on the streets of Barcelona as it isn’t an offence and therefore you can’t get arrested for it. This lead to more commissioned work from the paint companies who asked him to design the paint cans for other artists to use. Helmut Newton, a photographer who loved to photograph naked women, as well as Roy Lichtenstein, influences many aspects of his work.

He produced a book cover, which made designers approach him to ask if the drawings could be made in to children’s toys, of which he agreed. He provided many drawings, which were then sculpted and made and presented in mystery boxes so as you didn’t know which toy you would be getting.

Recently he has been participating in life drawing classes so as to keep up and improve his drawing skills as well as to keep active and observation well in an area that he finds hard and challenging.

He has also collaborated with a photographer who asked him to draw small images over the top of his portrait and fashion images and were then published and exhibited in Paris where an Art Director approached him to as him to do a similar thing to some of him images.

He gets permission to graffiti his work on to people who own land or buildings by asking and being polite as well as showing samples of work to show them that you are serious about your work.

Man Ray

 Man Ray was an American born French photographer who was interested in developing his own ideas as well as being best known for his surreal sculptures. After spending over 35 years as a painter he decided to create a separate section of his life where he experimented with photography and used black and white film, one of the first people to use this medium of work and subsequently wanted to call his work ‘Rayograms’ however the name didn’t take off.

His first major work was a patch work image, neither a painting or photograph which was influenced by Picasso before he met with Marcele DuChamp and challenged ‘What Is Art’. Ray got in to photography in 1920 when he realised that he didn’t like the photos that other people took for him so he went on to buy a camera and took photographs for DuChamp, of both him and his work. From there he created ironic titles for him images as well as having his work printed in magazines across America and France.

When he first exhibited his work, people weren’t interested in how they were however people were amazed by his photograms, which were created by placing objects on to photographic paper and exposing it to light within a dark room and this became his speciality within art. He learned to control the contrast and tones within the picture and this was exhibited in many magazines including the quote “You have liberated painting people said.”

He later gave up painting to focus on his photograms which took the form of what he imagined in his mind and all of this took place within a hotel room where he had basic equipment but everyone wanted to use him as a photographer, including artists, friends and family and later went on to rent a studio and bought darkroom equipment to use within it. Vogue later bought his portraits and also commissioned him to photograph celebrities and was seen as the photographer for rich people in France and America, which included interior shots and landscapes.

The core of his portrait images included him setting up the lighting before the client arrived and asked them neither to smile or have their eyes open until he took the picture and sometimes had them hold an object to distract them, all of which was photographed in front of a plain or checkerboard background. He also liked to play with shadows setting up his camera 3 metres away from the subject and did not take more than 12 images per subject and composed and cropped the images carefully. He also added pencil marks on to the images to improve them as he understood what makes a good shot is the use of light and contrast. His images showed symmetry, which he showed a lot of within his images.

He also solarised his images which was by accident the first time as he exposed his images to light during their development, exaggerating the contrast dark and light and making the images appear mysterious however, it as a risky technique to use due to the chances of ruining the film.

There are strong lines within all of Ray’s photos as well as sophisticated lighting and showed this by going against the trend by photographing realism, being experimental with abstract while everyone else was photographing pretty things such as landscapes while he as pushing the boundaries of photography.