Antonio Palmerini
While doing a lot of my research and creating my previous mood boards, I've come across a lot of Palmerini's work without being aware of it. But when looking back on my post last week, I was particularly drawn to his images out of all the ones I used for inspiration for my shoot last week. Similarly to my own practice, Palmerini blurs the lines between fine art and photography, using a lot of paining techniques to edit and enhance his work. There's a real moodiness and dreamlike quality to his work, which I love. His shots picture images of ethereal figures, half-formed and vague as if captured in a window reflection or an old mirror. The result is portraits of ghostly figures, silent but tense, against textured, blurred, unsettling backgrounds. I think it's this in particular that evokes the folk-horror inspired look in his work for me. It's also what I've been aiming to do in my own photos for this project, and now seeing something to close to what I'm trying to create myself I'm really learning that the best way to achieve the desired 'unfinished', folk horror, cinematic look is to apply slow shutter speed, double exposure, long exposures and high contrast development.
Before I have the opportunity to try use the techniques I've learnt will best create my desired folk horror look through a camera from studying Antonio Palmerini's work, I want to try and re-create a similar look in photoshop.
Edits:
Here are my Palmerini and folk horror inspired edits in photoshop. I've tried to combine the photos I have taken so far in this project from different locations into single images by using different filters, blending options and digitally collaging them together by cutting and pasting certain sections of my images onto another. I was really aiming to give them a cinematic, dreamlike feel and I think I achieved this with some more than others, particularly the more understated and more muted colour palette ones such as the Corfe Castle one below and the sand dune and moon one at the bottom. The brighter coloured edits, although they do feel otherworldly, it's to the extreme of them looking sci-fi and not folk horror which is what I'm aiming for. So that's definitely one of the things I've learnt from doing these edits this week, the more muted and earthy the tones of the picture are, the more folk horror it will look.
Below are my favourite edits I've done this week. I think these achieve the look I was going for the best. You can see the Antonio Palmerini influence with the figure being either blurred, or hard to make out, especially the one on the far left below. As well, obscuring the images by overlaying different textures of either trees or other landscapes I feel emulates that dreamlike and cinematic quality that Palmerini has in his own work. But, I've also made them my own by one, not using black and white images, two, embracing the blue and green colour palette of the original images and three, bringing in elements the the image which weren't originally there such as the moon or imposing another figure into the image. Seeing Palmerini use painting techniques and clearly add to his images in multiple different ways gave me the freedom to play around with my own images so much. However, I think it would be really good for my to try physically manipulating my images as well as digitally. This could add a rawness and an unfinished look that I might not be able to create in photoshop.
Week 8 reflections:
This week I've mainly focused on getting my head around how to edit my photos to fit the folk horror aesthetic that I'm going for. It's been fun experimenting with so many different filters and options in photoshop that I've never used before. I definitely think I know which ones are most effective now, and have found that using different blending options can be just as effective as using different filters. Looking at Antonio Palmerini's work has been heavily inspiring, and I definitely want to use the techniques I think he uses in my next shoot (apply slow shutter speed, double exposure, long exposures and high contrast development) because I think they achieve the style and look I'm going for perfectly.
Next week I'm planning to get another shoot done. I still have the lighting kit that I'm hiring, and as I haven't used it yet I really need to get on and factor in using this equipment as soon as possible as I'm going to have to give it back soon. So I need to plan and hopefully do a shoot next week.
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