For a few years now I have been following Brooke Shaden’s work in Instagram. Her work is unbelievable, her expressive approach and how she can build characters with intricate composition. I really appreciate her work. She isn’t a skilled camera woman, and she’s not shooting with a sophisticated lighting set. She prefer to have a simple setup with a solid coloured background and then, after merging them in Photoshop, take individual photographs of the elements which are included to their final composition. Her work is conceptual photography, both strange and a type of escapism. I am more impressed by her ability to use Photoshop to turn those pieces of images into something majestic to elegant, much like a painting. And the grading, too, is one of the aspects that really impress me as she’s able to add artificial highlights and shadows to her images that make it look genuine, as if the subject is in the actual world.
“Pre-visualization helps a lot. If you can see the image you want to make in your mind’s eye, that can help you break down all of the pieces that have to go into the final shot. The more I know about what I want the image to look like, the more I get right when I’m shooting”
Her influence for most of her artwork comes from the idea of the fear that she grew up experiencing it. When she was young, her parents would tell her that there’s nothing under the bed and then at some point she would go the opposite direction. She would come up with creative ideas that were inspired during her childhood.
She would rather be in her own neutral creative space dealing with her artwork rather than be in a really fearful place dealing with negativity and that’s the beauty of creating it. Allowing herself to express and experience those fears in whatever way she likes. She’s very different from other photograhers and it’s kind of a weird thing to talk about it because she’s met artists who are very artsy and who believe that art should be lived and breathe and that if she’s not like her art then it ain’t creating it authentically. She’s met other people who don’t care at all and they’re shocked to see that she is not dark, weird and creepy.
Reference: Youtube.com. (2019). YouTube. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsQRBLDGP2w
CreativeLive Blog. (2019). How Photographer Brooke Shaden Turns Fantasy Into Reality. [online] Available at: https://www.creativelive.com/blog/brooke-shaden-turning-fantasy-reality/
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