Pastiche - Page 1.

The first brief for the Studio and Digital Photographic Practice is to create a Studio Portrait Pastiche. A Pastiche is simply a work of art that imitates the style of another artist, or period. In other words, you are recreating the photograph of a selected photographer, attempting to use their styles and approach to capturing an image.

"Studio Portrait Pastiche:

A portrait-using studio lighting that emulates a photographer that you have researched. Analysis of lighting and creative technique used and applied is crucial. The work should be backed up with lighting styles in the research Journal or Blog"

Here is a very simple example of a Pastiche  :

We have Andy Warhol's iconic image of Marilyn Monroe produced in 1963, which was pastiched but famous graffiti artist Bansky. Obviously Banksy pastiche was meant to have an ironic approach, but whether he likes it or not, Banksy created a perfect example of a Pastiche. 

Research - Who's work are you going to use?

I had recently purchased the Visual Book '20th Century Photography', it's an 800 page book full to the very top of various photographers and their work, I thought, to begin I should browse through the book and see if any portrait photographers spring out at me. Obviously I would be looking for photographs of people, preferably against a plain background, in order to insure there was some chance of the photograph was shot in some kind of studio. It is advised that we use the photographic studio in order to use the controlled lighting.

The book only contains a few images by each photographer, sometimes it is only a single photograph, but this makes it possible to do further research if you saw one photograph you liked.

There are several photographers who's work had caught my attention, these included:

 Yousuf Karsh (p.312)

Irving Penn (p.482)

Gottfried Helnwein (p.236)

Richard Avedon (p.32)

Bert Stern (p.670)

The majority of these photographers did their work in the studio, using plain backgrounds and controlled lighting, which is exactly what I need to be re-creating. Out of the five of them I have decided to research only three. This included Yousuf Karsh, Gottfried Helnwein and Richard Avedon.