It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.
David Bailey 

David Bailey revolutionised fashion and portrait photography in the 1960s with his spare, graphic aesthetic and irreverent approach.  

Best known for his iconic photographs of artists, musicians and actors of the 1960s and 1970s, including Andy Warhol, the Rolling Stones and Catherine Deneuve, Bailey has gone on to publish work ranging from gritty London streetscapes to intimate photographs of his wife and family.

I am drawn to David Baileys beautiful photographs. Even though they don't directly relate to my work, but these black and white images are exactly what I am looking to create. They're timeless. These photographs draw you in, you feel like you want to be these people. You admire them and it doesn't particularly matter what they have done. You want to be one of these beautiful people. 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/i-was-young-and-foolish-the-truth-behind-david-baileys-legendary-way-with-women-1909500.html

The Pin-up girl culture became very popular during the early 20th century and continued well into the 80s and even late 90s. Many pin-ups were photographs of celebrities who were considered sex symbols. Other pin-ups were artwork, often depicting idealized versions of what some thought a particularly beautiful or attractive woman should look like. The genre also gave rise to several well-known artists specializing in the field, one of whom was the American painter and illustrator Gil Elvgren.

He takes photos of these pin ups and he paints them into these perfect images of beauty.
Fun, beautiful Woman that we would all love to be. He wipes out all their imperfections, makes them skinnier, makes them look more fertile. I originally started looking at Gil Elvgren for his glamour paintings, but I find the photographs behind his work even more beautiful. Real woman having fun, they're exquisite and they're powerful. 

Cindy Sherman wants to be a Feminist void of bullshit. Her film stills explore; vulnerability, power and femininity through the re-enactment of iconic film images. The ambivalent attitude she has towards the representation of women in popular culture manifests in her work as an objective image. I suggest this work is empty of narrative through lack of context which enables the viewer to create their own verisimilitude on a personal basis. I want to apply concepts of context back to the medium (of film) and use stereotypes and accepted hegemonies to discuss how contemporary women are affected by these representations.

http://darksilenceinsuburbia.tumblr.com/post/64870737934/republicx-black-and-white-surrealism-by-noe

Noé Sendas is a Berlin-based Belgian artist whose work is weirdly unsettling. Rooted in cinematic and literary references, his images depict ghostly, unnerving figures whose heads or limbs appear to be invisible, or which have seemingly blended into furniture or walls. Sendas works with film, sculpture and photography; his his most arresting work, examples of which are shown here, frequently uses film stills from Hollywood's golden age which are manipulated to remove faces and personality, turning the actor and actress's bodies into enigmatic, lifeless objects, often sculptural in their stillness. Its a fascinating body of work, that follows themes of abstracting and partly erasing the human body through photography explored by those ever-present titans, John Baldessari and Guy Bourdin, and the less well-known but equally brilliant American sculptor Robert Gober.  Its also something of a counterpoint to the contemporary subversion of John Stezaker's collaged appropriation of Hollywood head shots, whose results are very different but who delights in defacing once-great screen idols.

"Untitled Film Stills is a series of sixty-nine black-and-white photographs made between 1977 and 1980. In them Sherman appears as fictitious characters in scenarios resembling moments in a film. She used vintage clothing, wigs and makeup to create a range of female personae which she then photographed in apparently solitary, unguarded moments of reflection, undress, or in conversation with somebody off-set and outside of the frame. "

I have been focusing on Cindy Sherman for my project, I find her multiple personalities within her work fascinating. With the use of make-up and different wigs and clothes, she can change from a Hitchcock girl, a housewife to a woman victim to abuse. Its beautiful to see. Creating these nostalgic grainy images of a past time. Film stills full of stories, although she doesn't give us any help to formulate the tale behind them, they are left for us to articulate.

• "I didn't want to make 'high' art, I had no interest in using paint, I wanted to find something that anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art. I wasn't thinking in terms of precious prints or archival quality; I didn't want the work to seem like a commodity." Cindy Sherman.

Her work focuses on identity, gender, the "vulnerability" of woman, and of course  in comparison to this the secret power of woman. It is feminist work at its finest, it is taking the stereotypes of woman with film noir and spinning them on their head, saying, if this is what you want, here you go!. Stuart and Elisabeth Even addresses the importance of silent film on woman, they refer to early movies as manuals of desire wishes and dreams. Causing a gap between mothers who had been raised according to their traditions and daughters who wanted to be apart of the new culture.

 "The work is what it is and hopefully it’s seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I'm not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff." 

Frieze

vfff - slideshow

    Something a little different.