This photo taken by Nick Knight for a series titled ‘skinhead’ shows two young people with their heads shaved or partly shaved to be a “skinhead”. This was a part of a subculture in the late 60’s in London which later grew worldwide in the 1980’s, motivated by it being something that wasn’t in the mainstream. Knight photographed this culture movement and created a book from it (1994) to reveal the people involved with the subculture, in particular showing how they dress as part of a fashion photography series. The book captures their behaviour, fashion and their attitudes towards the police, government and school.

http://showstudio.com/project/nick_knight_image/skinheads

The piece above is by the street artist, illustrator and graphic designer Shepard Fairey. When creating his pieces, he very heavily uses stencils and layers to deconstruct the image into a select palette of colours of usually red, black and either a pale yellow or white. Deconstruction is something very typical in the field of graphic design and illustration as it allows us as designers to create new shapes from images like the one above Shepard has created. Through my own practice this can also be achieved through typography to give the text depth and perhaps emphasize the meaning of the text. When fairey creates his work, he uses limited colours and keeps his work consistent to show which colours are the foreground and background.

Mujer Fatale Offset

Roy Liechtenstein’s work is often considered postmodern as it includes features of modernism, full of colour and shapes and heavily using primary colours, focusing on foreground and background details. Post modernism is shown through subverting something away from its original purpose to help us understand it more. Roy’s work shows this through this piece above as showing a scene of a woman however he uses different shapes to create texture and create a sense of misdirection of the piece’ meaning and show the painting for what it is. Through my own practice I can apply this way of thinking when creating images to show what the piece is as an object and make the audience question the meaning of it.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-postmodern-art.htm#pop-art-in-the-style-of-roy-lichtenstein

This is a photo montage by Peter Kennard which depicts the MP/former prime minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair holding a mobile phone up to take a selfie of himself with an explosion in the background whilst laughing. The photo shows a connection between the artists feelings about politics and his feelings towards Tony Blair and the then current issues within the government and bombings in Afghanistan. Overall the image creates a feeling of mixed emotions as it is meant to be humorous however it has a serious meaning to it that Tony Blair was dropping bombs left right and centre to take out the Taliban in Afghanistan at the time.

Photo Op

This is a piece by the mystery artist Banksy which shows a homeless man sat with a cardboard sign saying ‘keep your coins, I WANT CHANGE’. Again, this piece is about connecting the artists feelings towards politics and communicating his message through graffiti on walls. Banksy is very mysterious and no one actually knows his true identity, in comparison, he likes to create a feeling of questioning his work so the viewer leaves thinking about his statement within his piece, more often than not a political issue, more recently he produced a huge wall mural in response to Brexit which evoked lots of issues as it shows someone removing a star from the EU flag as we prepare to leave the EU.

Keep Your Coins, I Want Change

This is a picture of the Former US president Barack Obama, taken by the famous photographer Platon who takes Images of celebrities and people with power in the government. He does this to capture their personalities through the lens by using very close up images with a 35mm film camera. The amount of detail produced by using this method of photography makes Platon able to produce very large-scale photos/murals. Platon likes to tell a story through his photos, for example in the Netflix series Absract, he visited a hospital with lots of women who had all gone through a sexual trauma of some kind, creating lots of feelings to the viewers of the photos to capture their message.

http://platonphoto.com/gallery/portraits/politics/barackobama/

This is a piece by Barbara Kruger, I have chosen this piece as it includes two things I am particularly interested in; photography and graphic design/typography. Barbara often uses found imagery from magazines and layers over small phrases of text often ironic to the photo behind it, she uses the typeface Futura Bold for her works. To show her expression of the text, Kruger uses a white typeface inside red boxes almost showing anger through the use of the colour to express her opinions. The phrase shown in this piece communicates a post modernistic approach as the audience won’t understand the meaning at first glance however the photo behind works with the text to show someone holding the piece of text, this could connote someone holding something whilst shopping.

http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/feminist/Barbara-Kruger.html

Man ray is a photographer and painter, being a huge part of the Dada and Surrealism movements, also the only American artist to take the lead in launching those movements. This photo is a piece titled ‘Rayographs’ which he has used a darkroom to produce photos using found objects, in this photo he has used 3d blocks with letters cut out of them. These letters don’t typically spell anything in particular, however the style is similar to that of Barbara Kruger. They aren’t influenced by one another in any way, although the way a letter is shown inside a box works quite well as it gives quite an informal representation of the text for the audience to understand it.

http://www.all-art.org/history658_photography13-16.html