Fragile Flowers- Post 1

I took a second series of images following on from my initial night-flower photographs and began to play with several new concepts and ideas. The first few images were taken towards the end of the twilight hour, which mixes the use of flash, long exposure and available light from the sky to create quite dream-like and abstract images, while little, if anything, is in focus, they do create quite atmospheric images, as below. Rather than using the Holga with the polaroid back as in previous images i chose to use a Polaroid 104 camera, this takes the same kind of peel-apart film but creates images which actually fill the frame rather than the vingette-ed Holga images. It also has the similar qualities, both good and bad, of the Holga, for example, it can also create multiple-exposure images, and has the same drawback as having a very limited focussing range (no closer than three feet).

I then began to work with double-exposures. At first I photographed two completely different flowers and overlapped them, I felt that this could link to the idea of fiction and truth in photography and the project. When we see a polaroid image we automatically assume that what is being photographed is the truth, in that the camera can only photograph what is physically there, and as it is created there and then what we are seeing must be "true". The polaroid photograph is intrinsically linked to the idea of the veracity of the image and the chemical process. This links to Bazin-ian film theories of realism and truth. The double-exposure questions the veracity of the image, often the images are quite subtley double-exposures which at first glance do not appear so unusual. The below images are examples of this.

After these images I started to think about the Cubist attitudes towards multiple angles in their paintings, most famously Picasso's work (below), which often incorporates several different views of the subject as he would move around painting it. I photographed the same lavender plant from three different angles which created multiple-exposed image similar in concept if not style, to cubist works. (left)