For my Under the Influence series, I decided to emulate Lissy Elle Laricchia's work. Though she has several different series in her portfolio, I was most attracted to her more demure, mysterious figures. She creates surreal female figures through compositing, usually using a muted atmospheric palette. The common subjects include women, dresses, flowers, plants, insects, and landscapes. I chose to create work like this because it will help me grow as an artist and improve upon the skills I have developed in this class. These photos use Photoshop by integrating the figure into different backgrounds and adding different motion elements to them, like the cups flying in the air or the sense of defying gravity. In my own paintings and photos, I enjoy having female figures as subjects in muted color palettes, so this will help me to develop a greater understanding of how formal elements of the composition can be manipulated to enhance the overall look of the piece.
What strikes me as so unique about her work is the feeling of being in a cool, humid, unnatural place. All of her work is so well composed with alluring and cohesive color palettes, usually consisting of natural tones that would be found in nature. To create a magical scene, she utilizes clouds, mist, and romantic lighting around her subjects. This combines with surreal elements like unhinged gravity or unreal gatherings of insects/flowers/etc to make the photos seem other-worldly. Her photos usually have a wide, low-contrast light source or a strong, one-sided light source. This helps bring depth to her compositions by choosing to integrate or separate the figure from the environment they are placed in. The use of harsh shadows will be difficult to emulate while also maintaining an even histogram, but I think this will be a welcome challenge and something I could improve upon based on my previous work for this class. There also seems to be a sense of perfect balance in her photos, rather than following the golden ratio or rule of thirds compositional rules. The figures are usually central and any other central elements are evenly distributed throughout the picture plane. This unnaturally perfect arrangement of elements adds to the unreality of the photos as well. This artist doesn't really incorporate short depths of field in her work, either. Instead, she keeps most parts of the photo in full focus while capitalizing on plain, calm backgrounds in order to establish focus and depth in the figure. This adds to the calming nature of the photos as well as puts them in an environment that feels a bit dreamy and like it was both posed and accidental in creation. She also incorporates a sense of movement in each of her photos, where your eye is drawn to. This can be the hair and dress of an unbalanced figure, the cups being tossed in the air, or the wings of the butterflies in flight. I like that the motion isn't always the central figure, but sometimes an element surrounding the figure, acting upon the figure. It is unique and a bit unnerving for the human in the photo to be so eerily still while the innate or natural parts of the composition are full of life.
In order to achieve this kind of feel in my own photos, I will have to do extensive planning to make sure the composite parts all work together cohesively. I would love to do some kind of photo in the gardens on campus to utilize natural light, like in her photo of the girl floating upwards. I would also like to experiment with artificial lighting and silhouettes for a photo, like in the photo of the hands inside the dress. Her work includes a range of focuses, from hands to portraits to full figures. This gives me a lot of room to decide what would be the most important element to focus on in my photos. I like this take on creative portraiture because it is very symbolic and detached for a portrait. The women are more of stand-ins for an idea rather than the photos being a personal commentary on the people in them. Most of the women are expressionless, posed unnaturally, and with the surrounding elements of the photo acting upon them as the motion in the photo. This is so unnatural for portraiture in my opinion that it adds to the ethereal sense of unbelonging Laricchia captures in the photos.
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