Irving Penn: Flowers

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Penn's book illustrated his great talent and turning clinical still life photography of flowers into high detailed fine art and although the subject matter of his work varied, his clean and sharp images and what make him infamous and are perfectly illustrated in this book. A pioneering artist that revitalised still life in photography, I think his use of lighting and studio work in conjunction with the flowers and gives a different perspective of the usually quite mundane objects. This is something I could look at recreating and have taken my own take on in the following sets

Flowers

Here I wanted to focus more on macro work so figured that I would start by looking at nature. I used black and white film and a macro lens so that the colour of the objects did not detract from the depth of field and the texture and structure of the objects, the things I mainly tried to focus on in the macro work. This creates the idea of the flowers more as structures as opposed to inanimate objects or just flowers.
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Photography excerpt from 'Flowers', Irving Penn, 1980
As seen in this photo Penn takes the flower out of its enviroment and in the clinical situation of his studio the focus turns to the shape, form and colours of the object. The strong lighting leads the viewer to notice the otherwised ignored fine detail and shape to the petals, which seem more synthetic than anything  natural and also the lighting seems to excentuate the colour and composition of the central part of the flower. Its is a perfect illustration of how I could incorporate the studio to give a new perspective to objects.

Studio Plants

Although the black & white macro work was good, I thought that taking some plants in to the studio would give me more control over the composition and lighting would create a better outcome (influence by Penn's work). However this was not the desired effect, although more controlled the photos are reasonable bland and plain as finding a way of getting the same sense of structure and depth seen with the black & white photos in situ, proved more difficult in the tame environment of the studio