Here is the picture that Elle and I are discussing. Photo by me:
Yes! Thanks for posting this. After reading this as well as your links, I can say that I sometimes like making abstract photography and not be self-conscious about the use of the term “abstract.” So you’ve freed me from the trauma that my grade school teacher inflicted. Thanks!
Before you brought it up, I was unaware of the pictorialist style. I read the wikipedia article, and recognize the pictorialist look from seeing it in old photographs. So I guess you can say the leg picture is pictorial, and the softness is coming from the lighting setup versus the glass on the camera, or the chemical tricks that the pictorialists used back in the day.
As for the picture “being slightly abstract.” Would you have known those were legs if I had referred to the picture as “orange and red” instead of “abstract legs?” Maybe if you looked at it long enough. Or maybe it would be immediately obvious to most. It’s hard to tell because my reality is tainted by the fact that I was there when the picture was taken, and I know how it was made. (hint: it was made with a camera and legs).
The why’s, wherefores and inspiration, I talked about briefly on my blog. What’s next is that I’m soliciting more models to further develop the concept. I really like the idea of mixing realism with not-so-real-ism. One gal I contacted had posted a portfolio on model mayhem. I reached out to her to ask her about modelling because she has a nice figure and the overall shape of her body was attractive to me. She would take good silhouette photos.
And in our correspondence, she came clean, and said that she had a lot of scars on her body that were covered up in the airbrushed pictures I saw in her portfolio, and would that be a problem? And to me, that idea was so cool…that she has these scars, which she normally goes through some trouble to hide from public view, but what if I took a picture that left her scars right out in the open, but her attractive figure (somewhat) obscured behind the scrim? How do we choose what to reveal to the world, and in what degree do we reveal it, and what happen when we start messing with the normal way of making those decisions? I dig the juxtaposition.
The scrim is nice because the closer the subject is to the scrim, the more detail you can make out. Otherwise, you have to infer by the shadows.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BnPdD6xgNg6/?utm_source=ig_web_options_share_sheet
@Elle, you’ve given me a lot to think about and I will take better photos because of it. Thanks for starting this thread!