In my cubist images, I was just making some images to see if I could work out a way to combine them to get a cubist effect. The idea behind it was, in Picasso and Braque’s paintings around 1905-10 they were trying to find ways of painting that could portray something that photography at that time couldn’t do. Photography had been able to produce very realistic images at that time and artists were concerned that conventional paintings were no longer needed. Picasso and Braque then made some work combining different angles of view on a scene/person in one image. In other work they would have, for example, a person in motion walking down a staircase, combining image in different stages of the motion at various points on the staircase and some blurred and others sharp.
What I’m trying to do is maybe not so clear; 1) to show that photography could produce the cubist effect and that painting was not the only way; 2) I was trying to make an allegory between what I’d been doing with my series of composites. In the composite of ordinary things which make up a memory, when we reflect on them, some parts of the memory fade, distort or change in their significance, and so the colours, tones and size of the parts of the composite change. Similarly, in the series of cubist images parts of each component images is differently selected, the colours or blending modes change, through the series.
I hope this makes the same allegory and also makes sense! I’m not sure the tutors really understood what I was trying to do, they seemed to think I’d gone away from my initial theme of the ‘infra-ordinary’ invoking memories.
To go back to the model in my images, she actually plays no real role for me in my experiments with cubism, although I think it was a lucky choice as the images are striking. I really wanted to try this cubist method and I needed some images of a scene/person from different angles so I could make geometric selections. I remembered that I’d taken images of a model who had stood in one place and just turned her head or body for part of the session, et voila! It also helped that she had a strong look too.
