UCA Week 1: Lens Based, ‘Uncanny’ Brief

(there is no) Introduction

please let me know if you think I need one [also let me know what you would change with this article :) ]

Artist Research

Before taking any images, we were given the task to research three artists with which to start our work. To begin with, I chose Man Ray.

Man Ray’s uncanny portraits. From Wikipedia:

The uncanny is the psychological experience of something as not simply mysterious, but creepy, often in a strangely familiar way.

Man ray regularly alters only a single element for his portraits to give them an eerie after-effect in the mind. For example, the subtle difference between tears and glass beads in this portrait of a solemn looking woman is enough to push her into the otherworldly category, and unsettle the viewer.

Or without any physical changes, a compositional alteration by blurring the image through long exposure doubles the eyes of this figure, transforming a stern glare into something supernatural.

By only changing a single element, the figure will retain their human and earthly nature, still familiar, but not quite real, and therefore uncanny.

Maria Svarbova’s surreal minimalist portraits.

Characteristic to her work is a limited, often flat colour palette. Bright colours, when used, are slightly faded, and the rest of the scene tends to match the hue. For example, in this image, a red cast is clearly visible in the back wall, as well as in her otherwise desaturated skin, matching the pattern-forming red seating arrangement.

Combined with easily recognisable, minimal backgrounds, the result is the generation of a strange, familiar space, but lacking in the colour or complexity we might expect in reality.

The figures in the images are typically explicitly strange, as in the image above, with the three girls interacting with one another and the space in an unexplained fashion. Otherwise, they are also depicted completing what would otherwise be a normal action, like blowing bubble gum, but without a clear expression, frequently staring out of frame.

Even when the figures are seen to interact in a clearer way, there is an offset with normality. This figure seems to stare at the viewer with an accusatory expression, despite the otherwise calm scene. Through minimal character expression, colour palettes and compositions, Maria Svarbova creates images with a distinctly unreal, unsettling and uncanny effect, whilst using real word locations.

Technique: badly exposed flash photography.

When a scene that would normally be visible to the human eye is captured with flash photography, it takes on a new, unseen appearance.

‘best. costume. ever’, johnwithouttheh via Reddit.

The flash time itself is too short for the human eye, and only illuminates the immediate foreground.

The result is a new space that, while resembling what can be seen with the naked eye, is distinctly other.

Untitled, Benoit Paillé

Unknown artist, unknown title, via tumblr, daisukeyokota.net

Redlipstickressurected, Katrin Könning

Kristie Muller (personal work)

Unknown artist

These images brought mine to Seal Nial. Seal Nial is an artist pushing this effect to the limit. By massively overexposing the foreground, with an empty background, the figures in her images become invisible, with the surroundings visible.

"Somewhere on earth", digital photo series by Seal Nial

The figures, whilst still human, appear ghostlike.

And the long exposure of the nighttime scenery gives it a heavenly or unreal feeling.

Strange particles help to maintain the sense of the otherworldly in her images, even when the figures appear more human.

The results are distinctly eerie, uncanny landscapes, whose inhabitants quietly stare into the distance or directly at the viewer. By maintaining their human outlines, but disfiguring their faces, Seal Nial can transform normal models into supernatural beings.

Cyanotypes

We got an induction in Cyanotypes one afternoon, and made a series using found objects. These are ordered chronologically.

Experimentation

I created two sets of experimental images as artist responses. The first set revolved around the effect of flying, made by shooting bursts of images while the figure jumps, posing as if levitating.

image selection

reference image

The highlighted image is the final result. To better match the reference above, the colours were broadly desaturated, besides the greens, which I made more intense, and shifted towards blue, reinforcing the dreamy effect of the composition. When combined with the levitation effect, the faded and altered colours serve to make the image unreal and uncanny.

I’ve made a GIF to demonstrate the process and final result.

GIF stills

Final result (GIF)

click on link to see GIF

Here are the final results:

My next work was inspired more by the artist Seal Nial, and their strange nightscapes and portraits. A friend and I went into the woods late at night to use the dense vegetation as a backdrop. I took large photography lights as well as my bike torch to create the lighting effects. I took images at regular intervals as well as the target images to create a visual narrative for our walk, starting and ending in badly lit suburbia. Overexposed flash images of the forest serve as an uncanny story guide.

the telecoms equipment in the forest struck me as out of place, so I added photographs of it for the unreal effect

I noticed towards the end that blowing on the lens in the cold fogged it, further distancing the images from the real world as the figures come out of focus, and the light blooms around them

A few weeks later, a friend wanted to go stargazing, so we hiked through some forest to get to a clearing. With the moon in full, I tried a few long exposures, and found I could create images that looked like daytime using only reflected sunlight from the moon. The contrast ratio between the stars and the sky, however, is much lower than in the daytime, given the relative brightnesses of the sun and moon. I created some of the most uncanny images I had so far: portraits and landscapes of daytime scenes with stars clearly visible in the background, and subjects who only experience the night-dark scene. Here is a video (imgur) showing how the scene appeared to the naked eye. Finally, I recreated a few of the overexposed subject images in the style of Seal Nial, improving on the composition and lighting.