Final design layout:

In comparison to my statement of intent:

Before conducting my project, my statement of intent consisted of a few paragraphs stating what I wished to achieve through this exam project. I stated that I aimed to closely follow themes of power roles and femininity, through photographing women and depicting them as equal to men, as this has been a reoccurring struggle in society for centuries. I aimed to illustrate the theme of union by tying in power roles to unity, through creating images that perfectly present women as a community, and how they have come together to defeat traditional expectations and stereotypes. I knew I needed to link my artist inspirations: Yayoi Kusama and Helmut Newton, to the theme of union as well as incorporating my own ideas based on experience of being a young woman.

I crafted my photoshoots in a way that I had originally planned to, exploring indoor and outdoor scenes, as well as photographing in places that my artist studies did. This way, I was able to carefully resemble my inspiration’s work, as well as including unique and personal ideas to develop this project. Helmut Newton is renowned for his provocative style of imagery, delving into themes of eroticism and power. Yayoi Kusama is well known for her distinctive use of repetition of colourful backgrounds with lots of pattern, where she explores self-obliteration and mental health. She uses the busy backgrounds to symbolise her mental state, after growing up suffering with hallucinations. Despite both of my artists being extremely inspiring and successful, they uniquely portray hidden messaged through their work, which is what originally inspired me to merge them together into my project.

Gender inequalities have created a strong narrative that women should not be allowed to have important roles or a high status, but I have always wanted to challenge this idea. Therefore, I want to show a modernised version of how the world views women, yet depicting them as powerful and dominant throughout my own work, despite not having lived through the 60s and 70s when these issues were at an all time high. I want to successfully demonstrate my understandings of these societal problems through presenting my work as a way of comparison, highlighting the change and how far women have come since the 60s, while also expressing my knowledge on how the world has changed to view women as equal to men. This effectively links to the theme of union, by highlighting the unity of men and women, not only women. Newton managed to help push this shift, as he demonstrates his feminist beliefs in an appropriate way that women can appreciate, which shows that many men in the world do believe in gender equality. In relation to Helmut Newton, my project follows his values as I used techniques that would allow the females in my images to appear how I want them to: confident. I used low camera angles in many of the photographs, to allow the model to be viewed as a character that holds power and dominance, this is because the use of a low angle physically makes them appear bigger in the frame.In relation to Yayoi Kusama, my developing and editing aspect of my project is mainly inspired by her bold approach to photography. Although I did not have vibrant backdrops or even set ups of installations, I used Photoshop to add in pops of colour to create luminosity, which I think turned out successful. I believe my work illustrates clear themes of femininity, power roles and even identity through my different approaches to each shoot.

What would I have changed:

Overall, my project as a whole has been successful. I demonstrated understanding of my artist inspirations and linked them to the theme of union, whilst also incorporating originality. However, one of the main aspects that brought my project down is my editing skills as I am not as comfortable with Photoshop than I am with Lightroom. This limited my ability to edit my images effectively, with patterned backgrounds. This meant that all of my final images that I edited using Photoshop were plain, and arguably dull.

Another element within my project that I would change is my camera skills. Sometimes I am not careful enough with the camera settings, meaning some images were underexposed and some were overexposed etc. Therefore, this made my editing process a lot longer because I had to fix simple mistakes that could have been avoided.

Lastly, I would change the style of my first photoshoot and also carry out more photoshoots. If I had completed a few extra photoshoots in the time given, this would mean my final outcomes would vary a lot more, displaying different aspects of the themes. Also, my first photoshoot was an experiment photoshoot, where I did not yet have a clear enough idea on how my images resonated with the theme union etc. This meant that by not doing enough research ands analysis before photographing, my photoshoot appears random and perhaps irrelavent.