Emma Hardy’s photography is known for taking a contemporary approach. she tends to try and create stories within her images using her children as the main subjects. Emma Hardy was raised by a family of actors so interest in a camera was bound to arise in her childhood. when she was young, taking photographs and making pictures was a strong interest she took apart in. She also realised that she was fascinated with appearance and how people organised and presented themselves to the world. twenty years later she focussed on her own family mostly of her children and was fascinated by the connection she felt with the images she created. She enjoys focussing on times of the day when the natural lighting is good to create an extra detail in her images. she said:
“I run towards beautiful light at any time of year, in any place in the world. It doesn’t always have to be sunlight; it can be a solemn cool light, a reflection, lamp light, dusty light filtering through a little window, green light under trees in a forest, firelight, snow light, moonlight even. It is some sort of painterly quality that pulls my attention, an emotional quality, something that jogs a memory deep inside me. I also believe I have an ability to ‘tune in’ to wherever I am, so that reflecting the nature of the people I meet, and capturing the tones of the local landscape or cityscape or internal “roomscape” becomes instinctive.”
She focusses on portraiture within her images but in environments the subject is exploring. her subjects a sometimes in unusual settings which creates a mix between reality and fantasy. She aims to bring across strong emotions in her images by getting her subject to express a certain emotion in the image of by the use of lighting (eg darker weather or time of day would create a different feel to a sunny day with bright light.
Hardy’s photograph series of her family also included their family struggles. Hardy had to sell her home, her marriage collapsed and her dad and dog had passed. Even though under the pressure of her life occurrences, Hardy still continued to produce photographs mostly of her family in the setting of nature, signifying the unpredictable nature of family life. This increased the power behind her project as it reflected deeply her life in that moment.
How does Emma Hardy link to the theme UNION?
Emma Hardy’s work relates to union in many different ways. One main way, which I am aiming to take inspiration from, is the use of exploring her family. The relationships between people would create a union between them. So each family is their own union, siblings are a union and partners are a union. Hardy takes images of her children and showing the relationships between them she captures happy moments in their lives liking playing together in fields or on family road trips. she also explores the union between the subject and their relation with the environment around them. She blends them with their surrounding where they seem like the fit in well with where they are. for example their expressions are matching to the golden hour in a field creating a warm and happy moment instead of them looking out of place and sad.
In this image, Hardy focuses on her three young children in the setting of a field. The closest girl subject start close to the image and take up most of the space and as you follow the line of girls you can see them getting smaller and less in view than the first girl. This could be signifying the age of the girls as it seems the girl in front if older than the others and Hardy could have done this to show how the oldest girl is drifting away quicker than the other too and she grows up. The girls take up the centre of the image showing that they are the main attraction to the photograph and the field just surrounds them. As mentioned before, Hardy’s intentions was to show the nature of family and in this image she has done that by using nature as the background/setting to the image showing the nature surrounding the family. The image doesn’t seem to have been taken with a tripod so it can be concluded that Hardy was taking snapshots while she walked behind the girls to capture the image in the moment rather than setting it up to be staged.