Floria Sigismondi’s work has been amongst my very favourite, ever since I analysed a few of her photos for a homework assignment. She manages to create mood and atmosphere so well; it’s one thing to have your model posing there, all dressed up and made-up, but it’s another thing entirely to be able to truly acheive an atmosphere like Sigismondi does.
A less famous, but by no means less talented, photographer whose work I have loved for a long time is Katrina Grekof. She has no books, no famous commissions, no work in international galleries, but she is very much an undiscovered gem in Russian photography. Her work is in the same vein as Sigismondi’s in that the atmosphere of much of her work is very dark, a lot of it bordering on (and crossing over into) fetishism. Grekof’s work, however, looks a lot more clean; while Sigismondi’s photos often have a lot of detail in the background, Grekof’s are uncluttered, the background often just solid black.
Cindy Sherman, the most famous of my three photographers, I happened upon by chance while researching Sigismondi. It was her later work that struck a chord with me; disturbing, almost revolting scenes of dirtied and broken mannequins lying prone, disembodied limbs arranged like a shop window display. It’s the stuff of nightmares, for sure, but Sherman has method and meaning behind her apparent madness. Her work is more extreme than both Sigismondi’s and Grekof’s, but unlike their work, which often seems to be surreal for the sake of it, Sherman has a message. The fact that she is her only model is perhaps an indicator of this; she knows what message she wants to portray, and she is not going to entrust it to anyone else, and risk losing even a fragment of meaning. Of course, an image can still be appreciated for its beauty without having any real meaning to it.What I would like to gain from this study is an understanding of how such images are created, the chemistry of the photos, how each component comes together to form something that can provoke strong emotion and reaction.