 This video is brought to you by Squarespace. Click on the link below for your two-week free trial. How's it, how's it? Photography has the capacity to move us in a great many different ways and of course one of those ways is to make us feel disquieted and to feel uneasy that something's not quite right. Some of the spookiest images that have stayed with me in my mind certainly have been not paintings or or unusual illustrations in books but photographs that have burned themselves into my consciousness and even now in the dead of night will linger and float into my mind's eye. So a nice simple one to get started. So we have a lady here, a German photographer called Loretta Lux. Now her photography is of some children and you know unusually surreal worlds and I love the fact that there's just this kind of a disquiet going on when you look at the the faces of these kids that they are certainly you know normal looking children but the world that they inhabit feels slightly unusual and a lot of this is down to either way that Loretta Lux has photographed these things and she's constructed a world using a blend of obviously traditional photography and digital manipulation and I know in the past I've given digital manipulation a hard time but you know what it's not a major thing when it blends together so seamlessly like this does. So that's your starter the strange weird world of Loretta Lux. Ralph Eugene Meat Yard. Yes and there's a word that you may not have heard before but I know some of you have because you've been asking for him and here we go. So we've got this is his monograph dolls and masks and I'm not going to get too much into his background and why the photographs are the way that they are but this is a classic example of photography that is odd I think is a word that especially in this book he uses a great number of you know of masks on these these kids and and photographs that have a sense of unease about them I think that's always a a good a good word to use when talking about Ralph Eugene Meat Yards photography unease yes Ralph Eugene Meat Yard is definitely a photographer who has slipped through the cracks somewhat I feel that and this is hardly surprising because his work is very challenging and and I'm sure that a number of you watching this will kind of go I really don't get it it seems just a bit odd it's one of those photographers who when you show somebody outside of photography this kind of book they sort of look at you and go you know you're just just weird and maybe that's what is in these photographs they appeal to my inherent sense of weirdness you know I was I I was a student you know art student I wanted to be weird I was a goth and one sort of thing so all of these things tap into this kind of thing of going look how strange I am look how awesome I am because I like Ralph Eugene Meat Yard if that's you hey welcome to the club but obviously if it's not for you that's perfectly fine because we're going to move on to the next photographer so a complete change of pace here because we've got bom bom bom bom this is if you can't see Erwin Olaf now his world that he creates in his photography isn't the weirdness of Ralph Eugene Meat Yard it's not the the subtle disquiet of Loretta Lux but it's this hanging conversation that sits just above us where something odd is going on something weird is not quite being resolved here which is a odd odd thing to say but that's the point I think that in Erwin Olaf's photography is I can't really put my finger on the story there is something going on and it confuses us and it makes us feel slightly uneasy because it's almost like we are kind of voyeurs in this world which is drifting into the realm of Miesel talking about you know things in a kind of arty-farty sort of way and now we don't really want to do that but I like this his photography reminds me of Samus of the Japanese and the Asian sort of horror films where they're they're they're a lot more cerebral that there's things going on under the surface there's not slasher and blood and gore and stuff it's psychological horror that and in him there's psychological stories there's place for us to lose ourselves all to discover ourselves and we're moving on into the scary world of fashion and Tim Walker especially now I don't think of a single genre in photography where people can create weirdness just for the sake of of creating weirdness and and I love the fact that in Tim Walker's world that there is some dark stuff going on that that is acceptable because apparently it's it's fashion like Erwin Olaf Tim Walker's photography isn't necessarily like kind of spooky or scary but it's unusual and it's and it's bizarre in the worlds that he has created I love photography's capacity to create these worlds to be able to be able to craft them because unlike in say a painting that has you know like Edward would just scream or something like that where it's quite clearly you know it's a painting that represents a world in somebody's head a photograph especially when it's a well constructed photograph an elaborately staged photograph feels like it is lifted from real life like this is a scene that actually happened and that's what I enjoy about Tim Walker's photography is that we can almost almost imagine that somewhere in this world there is a lost country where this kind of thing happens all the time a bit like the the series The Prisoner granted Tim Walker is a fashion photographer but I feel that his photography opens up the door to a world that we're not supposed to see as mere mortals we need to be part of the the the fashion illuminality allow me if you will to step into the world of processing just just very briefly to illustrate the point about creating artifice for this we're going to use Rankin yeah I a photographer again though I don't really talk about too much on the channel but certainly worth checking out and again all these photographers I will link to in the description box below Rankin is a well known British celebrity photographer but the photograph that we're going to look at today is this photo of Marilyn Manson and for those of you who don't know Marilyn Manson is that that shock rocker from America and he's very good at creating his own spooky or a mystique thing but this photograph and I love you know the way that the colors and everything on this looks because they feel so fake and that's what I'm talking about with processing here often processing when it's done badly looks ridiculous it looks like it's not done properly it just it's bad or it's overdone what have you and in this case though we're looking at this photograph of Marilyn Manson and he is a the crown prince of being a fake personality he has made and constructed something I mean his name is Brian not Marilyn Manson but you know and and of course the way that that that Rankin has processed the image so everything about this is smooth plastic you know just it's it's an inorganic material I suppose that might be the way of looking at it is reminding us that the very figure being photographed is odd and weird segway neatly on and talking about processing is this photographer called Joyce Tenson who might have featured on the channel previously now her photography is this weird mixture of practical effects within cameras but as far as I can tell like a lot of photography it's extremely secretive about her approach but what I love about her photography is that it taps into something that is a very source of a lot of kind of spookiness and etherealness and that's the idea of of religion as it were and it's the hardest part because she grew up next to a nunnery I believe so within her photography there has this kind of I would say spooky feel to it but certainly in otherworldly quality to it possibly like these are spectres rather than ghosts of people from the past that within there like the photo you like Renaissance paintings there are elements that are there to be discovered to be teased out of a photograph and I love this about her photography it's certainly the first time that I was ever exposed to it it was it just had a haunting quality there's the word the word is haunting that these figures like so many of the photographs that we looked at today don't exist in our world they exist somewhere that we kind of recognize as our world but not really and that puts us on edge that changes the way that we feel about the photographs in a previous episode I talked about finding inspiration for photography and I think in this case Joyce Tennyson has certainly drawn quite heavily from sort of religious iconography if you want to find out more about where you can find your own inspiration photography I will link to a video after this brief word from today's sponsor back in the day mistakes used to happen all the time when you were making a website however these days Squarespace has made it so easy to create a stylish modern responsive website without any knowledge of coding needed it's ideal for people who want to have their own online presence but we're always scared about the technical know-how that was needed to create a website they have a simple drag-and-drop building system for the pages you can add a page from a single click of a button you can add a photo gallery with as much simplicity as you like for a camera club there is also the option to have a members only area where you could sell subscriptions and indeed if you wanted to sell your own prints to the worldwide audience Squarespace have got it all for you I remember making mistakes about trying to shift a domain to one of my hosting sites in the past and again Squarespace have got it all under control so head on over to Squarespace by clicking on the link below the Squarespace.com forward slash the photographic icon you will get a 14-day free trial plus 10% off of any of your subscriptions when you choose to go live with your website thank you ever so much for watching here's the video that I talked about earlier it's been a pleasure to have you here have a great Halloween and I'll see you again soon