Laila Muraywid

As you regular bloggers may recall, last October I went to Paris for the Paris Photo weekend, whilst I was there I went into a little art gallery and came across an artist, that I recently rediscovered during the daunting process of packing all my belongings up and moving out of my student accommodation of the past three years. When I saw Laila Muraywid's work I found it breathtaking and took a brochure home (which is how I rediscovered her again) and so I thought I would share her work with all of you out there. She is a photographer, sculptor and painter and her work is fabulous. She hand makes all the bejeweled props that you see in her images and also paints over the top of the photographs to add bits of colour.

Her work is daunting, powerful and most of beautiful, exploring and celebrating the various female form. She is a huge inspiration for me and I love her work so I hope you do to!

Old Disposable Found, Finished and Developed

Just as the title suggests, I found an old disposable camera that only had a few photos taken on it, so I used it up, developed it and loved the results of pictures taken over a year ago with recent spur-of-the-moment shots. Enjoy!

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Self Portraits (above)

My Chair

Childhood memories and the items that go with them are objects we all hold dear. The little rocking chair my Granddad made me is an item I will never get rid of along with all the other teddies, nic naks and objects that to others may seem like junk but to me hold my fondest memories.

Photographs are a way that we keep these items alive, even after possibly loosing or giving them away and a lot of the time people will document them before doing so. So with this series shown below, in a simple and intimate space I decided to document each item alongside the chair that I hold so dear. I hope you like them and feel inspired to look over some of your most cherished items to. It always brings back good stories to tell!

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Self Portrait

I have been thinking about doing a series of portraits including flowers after seeing an article in Pop magazine the other month. I have been experimenting with a few self portraits for now just using my little digi camera. See what you think.

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WEBSITE UP AND RUNNING

I've been working on my own website for a while now and I've finally got it ready so please, go check it out!

www.claireorgan.com

Hendrik Kerstens - Contemporary 17th Century Portraits

I first came across Kerstens' work at the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in 2008 and ever since have followed his work avidly. The portraits of his daughter Paula have been a huge inspiration to my Musician portraits as the lighting I found particularly beautiful and loved his modern twist to portraits that could be otherwise mistaken for 17th Century paintings like that of Vermeer and Rembrandt due to his characteristically 'dutch' light used, which I adapted for my own portraits.

I absolutely adore his humorous portraiture and thought I would share this new talent with you all and let you make up your own mind about the too!

Instrumental

At the beginning of my Negotiated Practices project, before I started doing portraits, I looked into the body language of a musician with their instrument, focusing on the hands and posture and leaving out the face in the majority of the images. I was trying to show the feeling and style of musicians whilst they play without actually portraying their facial expressions. These photographs were all done on black and white film, inspired by traditional black and white jazz photographs that are extremely atmospheric and that I generally love.

Whilst I do really love the images, I found them a little cliched and just wanted to focus on portraits and look at how absorbed a musician gets when playing as I felt the hands just didn't show the connection someone has with the music they are playing. However I thought you may like to see where my project started out! Let me know what you think bloggers!

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