Melinda Gibson | Case Study
Melinda Gibson is a London-based photographer born in 1985 in UK. She studied Photography at the London College of Communication and after graduating in 2006, she assisted various photographers, notably Martin Parr and Wolfgang Tillmans, while continuing to develop her own photographic practice.
Her publication of photomontages 'The Photograph as Contemporary Art' has drawn critics as she appropriates the images found in Charlotte Cottons’s seminal book 'The Photograph as Contemporary Art'.
The images are illustrations of well known photographs such as Cindy Sherman, Corinne Day and Juergen Teller. Gibson cut up and rearranged images from some of photography’s greatest figures into multilayered compositions to explore the circulation and canonization of iconic images.
Gibson raises questions about the educational system, copyright and licensing in this series of work. For Gibson, she concludes in her blog “By slicing, cutting and decontextualising the images, I start to gain a greater appreciation of these works: I start understanding why and how these images have been created”.
Brief
To do a case study on Melinda Gibson's works and create a series of 3-5 images using traditional methods (non-digital) based on a concept using her style.
Insight
Humans have different personalities and passions.
Message
The different personalities and passions affect our behaviours, physically and spiritually.
Concept
To create a campaign to show how humans express themselves in relation to fashion.
The Process
I started by analysing how Melinda Gibson constructs her photomontages, and she does them by performing slicing, cutting and combining of images from different categories of people, landscapes and exteriors/interiors.
I began my work by choosing images from a fashion magazine BAZAAR (which was the only magazine I had then). As Gibson avoids using digital manipulation of images in her series of work, I will not be using Photoshop to edit my work and maintain the rawness in my work too.
After picking the images that I want, I started cutting out the parts of the main image (clothes on the model) and then attached the piece of globe sweater image at the back carefully. I repeated this with the pants but I had to retain a small part at the bottom of the original image as the piece of maps pants image was smaller and didn't fit too well. I used washi tape to help stick the pieces in place temporary as I cut along the edges to fit the curves and to determine the position when I adhere the pieces together finally.
I repeated the process with the other 2 sets of images.
Result
These are the three photomontages I have constructed using images of models, clothing, objects and also, animals from magazine BAZAAR to show how humans express themselves in relation to fashion.
1 Ideaologies: A model clothed fully with images of the Earth.
2 Body vs Mind: A woman whose upper body was replaced with a happy infant and lower part with greenery and a body of water.
3 Different: A group of woman dressed lavishly but their faces were replaced respectively with (from left to right): face of an owl; flower blossoms; face of an Iguana; face of a doe. Some of their gloves were also replaced.
Reflection
I have spent quite some time working on these collages (I think around an hour for each?) and this experience was definitely fruitful. Taking some time off from my busy life and settling down to focus entirely on cutting and slicing images was oddly healing too. The cutting and rearrangement of the images for the purpose of new meanings in the resulting photomontage is a thought-provoking process.
I am most satisfied with my second piece of work and I have named it Body vs Mind and I really like the juxtaposition of the facial expression of the woman against the infant. I think it was quite regretful to not have more magazines at home so that I can recreate more pieces like this.
As she says, “By slicing, cutting and decontextualising the images, I start to gain a greater appreciation of these works: I start understanding why and how these images have been created”. I think through this activity of attempting in the style of Melinda Gibson, I have better understood the art of photomontage.
