Miss Aniela Photography

NOT my work! Please read on.
Following my last post, which asked for people’s advice on publishing other people’s work on my blog in order to discuss my art inspirations and indeed other people’s inspiration as part of the (hopefully) stimulated subsequent discussion, I have decided to go ahead and upload a montage of images I recently came across which I found inspirational/relevant to my art pursuits.
The images above are retro postcards (purchased from a card/print/archive shop in Brighton centre - source and publisher of these particular images unknown - if anyone can help me on who the artist is, I would be grateful!) Their bright colours and 50s fantasy-ad feel enticed me at once to buy a few of them.

On first sight, all you see are Colgate smiles and trance-like stares. On second sight and third sight, however… well, that’s all you see again. Physically, the models’ use of make-up, costume, expression, pose, and hairstyle; and photographically, the use of DoF, colour, and framing are certainly striking. The hyperbolic happiness of the models’ moods can seem to some glib, drugged-up even! - but to me, pleasing - reminds me an awful lot of American Ads of the 40s and 50s.
I find the colour and loudness of retro patterns, colours and costume extremely appealing in an aesthetic sense. Example of where I have used bold and brash colour in my work can be seen in this piece for example, Hide & Seek. An examples of a taste for retro can be seen in my image I Have Finished That Long Thomas Hardy Novel. Also, the use of pearly white teeth, oozing the American Dream, and mannequin-like poses (for my use of the latter, see my image Memoirs of a Woman of Leisure) convey to me a sense of the surreal and the sublime.

The display of a traditional values via the use of the heterosexual couple in the image lower left may seem like a bit of a cliche, but I included it in the montage in order to show the images’ use of duo-model, and, the excellent effects with the snowflakes (just to confirm, is not dandruff) the latter being my motive for selecting and purchasing this particular postcard.

I did once feel directly inspired to create images that could hypothetically act as fantasy adverts. Camel is the main of these five images which use cigarettes - notably Camel Lights - in a over-saturated, feel-good ambience of brightness, airbrushedness and admittedly nudity, the latter which wasn’t necessarily intended but obviously mounts up the sexual connotation. I do intend to create more ‘advert’-like images in the future, and feel inspired to do so by my helpless fascination for the doll-like, hyper-real images in such images as those above, and those in American Ads.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 6:38 pm and is filed under Inspirations - References to other artists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.