 Today we'll be dipping our photographic toes into an enticing world of ethereal portraits. We're going to see the surreal normality of apartheid South Africa before revisiting the early 90s music scene. Three very different photographers in a bit of an eclectic mix which we'll just go to show you how broadly you can cast your net when looking for photography to inspire you. A little bit from here, a pinch from there and you'll start to blend your own distinctive imagery and style. How's it? How's it? One of the best things about this channel so far, aside from the wonderful community, is that in addition to being able to share my love for photography with you, I'm also being introduced to photographers who are what they're new to me. It's a constant reminder there's always someone new to discover who will capture our attention, who's going to excite us with their photography. These three photographers I'm going to share with you today have influenced my own photography in various ways and I certainly hope that they're going to inspire you in some small way too. I'm a big sucker for portraits that are well on the surface fairly simple you know but once you spend a little time with them discover that they're quite subtly complex. Now I'm not sure if that's even like a real thing you know subtly complex and it probably isn't but you know what I'm just going to run with it. So I suppose what I'm driving at is that if you look at a Joyce Tennyson portrait quickly it could feel like any sort of run-of-the-mill late 80s early 90s kind of arty glamour portrait especially this image of Jodie Foster. It has that odd vibe that portraiture from the period seems to have you know the canvas background the draped clothing. Now perhaps it's something a little bit deeper perhaps it's just the quality of something that's photographed on film film images seem to have an organic feel to them that digital doesn't quite seem to have. Yes I'm totally aware of the contradictory nature of that statement you know after all I'm now talking about a digital representation of an image and I'm presenting to you in a digital way there is nothing organic about any of this you know it's just that there's something about a photograph that's created on film that has this sort of feel to it so it's somewhat akin to like when audio files describe this or discuss the differences between you know vinyl and cd you know to people for whom this matters it matters a great deal but I think for most people they'll sort of say well I don't see any sort of any where's the benefit anyway no doubt this is going to spark some other debate in the comments below like the previous video did with this Photoshop gate type of stuff. Anyway that's a neat segue into something that I I love love love love love about Joyce Tennyson's work and this is the way that she plays with light physically in her portraits you know so she's not doing any sort of photoshoppery sort of stuff on this and when I first saw them I spent ages picking apart the techniques that I believe she's employing in in her lighting setups especially the ones where there is some sort of painting with light effect going on in all of photography it's the it's this way that light can be physically manipulated that I find so fascinating if you're not familiar with this technique and it basically means you keep the shutter open and everything is obviously pitch blacks there's no light around and and then you you are going to use a source of light to to register stuff on on this on the central the film manually in this case I'm guessing them what was posed you know the studio is darkened and then the strobes are triggered and then a torch of some other sort of light source was then used to paint in the parts maybe like the halo around the head now aside from the the semi-religious and symbolic aspect of some of Joyce Tennyson's images which is not completely surprising given that her parents worked in a convent when she was young what I do like is this painterly quality of the light is absolutely beautiful and it's very simple and this is what we're talking about this sort of this simple complexity you can't just light stuff and and make it soft you have to have shape the light needs to crest and it needs to mold the subject it needs to allow the subject to speak to not overwhelm them but to elevate them to being in the stars of the photograph it's a bit of a bit of a change of pace here from the ethereal to an almost boring normality but it was the one that was at odds with the with the grim reality of apartheid era South Africa David Goldblatt photographed the changing face of South Africa from the 1960s onwards perhaps he was best known for two books which at least for me sort of perfectly sum up this this all weird duality of that time those books are some african as photographed and a book called in boxburg now in boxburg is an excellent example of how personal circumstance and experience so greatly shapes the way that we interpret photography as a viewer especially documentary photography to illustrate this in 1984 my family moved from the uk to south africa into a suburb not far from boxburg now like a lot of places at the time these suburbs looked fairly similar you know all the houses were built by the same company everybody seemed to have these sort of scrubby newly laid lawns and South Africa's in the middle of a drought then so everything was very dry and dusty and there were these wide open stretches of felt between the suburbs and and they're dotted around when you went for a drive with with the minds and the mind dumps of of johannesburg so when i page through the book and i look at these photographs in in in boxburg i don't necessarily see the narrative that golblat is is creating certainly from my you know photographic standpoint i can see see what he's driving out and and this kind of this this juxtaposition of the images and and the powerful messages they have but because of my own personal perspective of these images they don't evoke within me the same sort of emotional disquiet that i would get from say looking at pictures of 1930s Germany this is a tricky thing it makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable that rather than looking at these photographs and thinking of the of the inhumanity that man is capable towards other men they don't they don't do that they remind me of of my childhood you know that that these are places that feel familiar to me that they they evoke nostalgia and and and in fact i feel uncomfortable even admitting that and and in some ways i don't know if i'm going to get any flak for that but it it's i don't see that and it's that's just such a powerful illustration of of how much that when we read photographs or even take photographs that the way that other people would interpret them is going to be so personal so unique now perhaps it's because of the way that goldblatt photographed without any sort of a verb message in mind that allows me to to kind of possibly interpret these these images in some way you know it goes to show that that one doesn't always really need to be in your face you know to ram home a point in photography to create images that have an emotional impact as an aside there is fairly obviously a rich history of photography in in south africa especially documentary photography both from a black and a white photographer's perspective now originally i wanted to talk about alf camalo now he was nasa mandela's personal photographer he was at sharpville and he and he saw a side of a apartheid which which the west and and white photographers most certainly did not unfortunately there is so little of his work that is available online and i very much doubt that it ever will be because after his death his estate has been the subject of legal wranglings and and and all this kind of stuff that somewhat times goes on and all of this is going on his negative archive all his collection of negatives are in a museum that he he started about his photography which is now just slowly rotting away in in a field somewhere near sueto i believe and i think that's a that's a crying shame that for every one vivian meyer there are so many other important photographers who are becoming lost to history and of course that is possibly one of the one of the drawbacks of of the analog versus the digital age in a sort of counterpoint to joys tenison steve double has a more experimental certainly less focused and a more diverse sort of feel to his photography like well pretty much everybody when they are young you know i was quite heavily into music and the pages of the nme which is a a musical newspaper in the uk helped to shape my my early visual tastes along with with my music tastes and at the time steve double was my photographic hero it was the early nineties you know brit pop was all the rage along with grunge and his photographs helped open doors for my own photography they said that i could break rules that i could try different things and well basically just do my own thing because nobody had ever done this before now that's hardly a groundbreaking worldview but it's one that every teenager thinks is completely unique to their generation and it certainly was for me at the time i thought his cropping the use of gel lightings the emulsion lifts and being able to capture these larger-than-life celebrities in in a unique way that was so odd with what i've been told about photography up until that point you know was was was revolutionary but little did i know that i was getting small introductions piece by piece to the likes of ritted avidant and the likes of of david bailey it's fairly hackneyed now and it probably probably was then b&r was i was throwing in some cross-processing into my work i was doing all sorts of things and these photographs piece by piece were helping me to fill in a few paragraphs a few words into my visual dictionary of course looking back now some of those photographs are just like complete bubblegum but of course that's the point you know they were created for disposable newspapers of of what at the time were disposable music stars and of course that's their beauty that they are fun you know that unlike the images of of say kevin cummins who who i greatly admire but his photographs came across as earnest and and serious plus all of the things that steve double did i could copy it wasn't difficult you know it's obviously getting a great photograph is his tricky but the the base techniques are not they weren't that super difficult and that was one of the joys of the pre-digital world that it wasn't too hard to kind of sort of pick apart how somebody created something so i was playing with gels with cross-processing you know all of the techniques he was doing this kind of wobbling the the easel during a print which i'm going to guess is what was was behind this this photograph you know so one part is out of focus all this stuff is about copying and copying is a great tool that you can employ to develop your own photographic skills finding inspiration can be extremely difficult when everybody's drawing from the same pool you know that we're looking in the same places i'd encourage you to look a bit further into times and places that aren't all that well visited you know like me talking about the early 90s sort of Brit pop scene look into your own childhood look at things slightly outside of photography you know maybe you have your album art cover there's stuff like that look at what inspires you and you're going to find a rich rich rich seem of inspiration that you can mine for your photography which neatly goes into the David Goldblatt thing of being on the minds and job as you see what i did there so so clever anyway thank you ever so much for being here once again i you know thanks for watching and i have a good weekend and we'll see you again next week