Research

So I need to do some work on narrative photographs and photographers.

For now I have chosen James Lomax and Lawerence Ripsher

Two very different photographers two every different sets of work but booth narrative.

James Lomax has produced a body of work looking at gun crime in the UK, Greater Manchester specifically. It documents a crime scene on a street that looks very generic and could be anywhere in the north west of England. It shows the police officers outside the premises and the cars and the tape. I like it because the images alone do not tell the full story, you have to read the text before hand to get a sence of what has happened. If you had no infomation about it at all and you just saw the series your imagination would run away with itself with theories about what happened. The images themselves are not very striking, they show the aftermath of an even rather than just the event itself. The images are a little mundane, they dont really show the tradgedy of the event or the seriousness, you dont get the shock value that the even realy deserves. But then again if you read the accompanying text it says that the shooting was a 'petty incident' so maybe the mundane everyday feeling that the image have are reflecting the mundane every day event that shootings have become.

Lawerence Ripsher

I actually really like Lawerence Ripsher's work. His narratives are actually really eerie and destructive. He seems to be obsessed with destruction and devastation a theme that runs strong through his galleries. He seems to base his work around finding new desolate broken places and basing his work around them. I especially like his galerie entitled 'Wonderland is Dead' It ties in with the lates cultural trend of Alice in Wonderland themed art, cinema, music, fashion and literature. I like the decaying surroundings and the sence of chaotic emptyness that seems to surround the model. She seems lost and really evokes the sence of a dead wonderland, the building looks like it could have been a school a wonderland for a lot of cultures that dont have regular access to education. And the destruction of this is quite sad as it is a shame. The emptyness in the images works well with the theme, wonderland was a confusing jumble of different acid trips and this destrictive chaotic atmosphere is what i imaging wonderland would look like if it got destructive. The set of images work well as a narrative as they dont really tell the story they show the aftermath of an event.