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William Klein's Life is Good & Good for You in New York is regarded as one of the most influential and groundbreaking photo-books created, the visual energy captured the rough-and-tumble streets of New York—a city Klein once described as “the world capital of anguish”—like no photo-book had done before. This photo-book really stood out to me because, I have been to New York once, and even though it was only once, it captured a specific bit of me, this bit now wanting to live in Brooklyn for a while. However the style of the book isn't the stereotypical New York we see in Hollywood movies where everything is great, its nitty and gritty, the real deal, genuine people, genuine lives.
The photo book is in black and white, the photos looking harsh or almost brutal, as if not a lot of effort was put into actually taking them. |
This city of headlines and gossip and sensation needed a kick in the balls. I saw the book as a monster big-city Daily Bugle with its scandals and scoops that you’d find blowing in the streets at three in the morning…. For me photography was good old-fashioned muckraking and sociology… I could imagine my pictures lying in the gutter… I was a newspaperman! Or a Frenchman. One time in Harlem I cooled things down by saying I was French. “Hey! This guy ain’t white. He’s French!”
- William Klein |
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Having done work on the indecisive moment before, analysing these images when looking through them was relatively easy. You can see above that two aspects of this book really caught my eye, the first being that they have paired some photos with text, in this case it looking as if it were hand written, it also says things that aren't contextual, things such as "wings on devils of desire please me" . This though seeming a bit strange was one of the things that stood out to me the most because of the idea of having hand written messages in a book for you as a viewer to take any way you wish. All the images have been given what looks to be like a boost in their saturation, making the colours bold, for example the last image of the book shown above has a person in a red top, the red really standing out on the page against the pale blue sky, also being complimented by the red font on the parallel page. This is something that really stands out to me being eye catching and bold, something I'd love to bring as an aspect to my book is bright saturated colours.
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When looking at there pictures above, I feel as if I have drifted from my original theme a bit, as well as this I am not happy with the photos, they don't remind me of either Waplington or Crewdson. As well as this they don't stand out to me how I wanted them to they are, to me; boring and don't have the value I though they would have had.
Because of this I have looked more into the work of two photo-books I studied, these being New York by Eva Fuková, Marie Šechtlová and Miloň Novotný, this book for it's work with colours, the photos that are just white and orange really stand out to me and I would like to try recreate this with red and black or other darker colours. The second book being The Indecisive Memento by Nick Waplington. This for me really made an impact because of the use of text both on black pages and on top of photos, I think that I would like to incorporate bits of text into my book about my health or how the people I photograph perceive my issues from outside my head. This is my first draft of the photo-book, or as I will call it, 'my epiphunie book'. The reason I'm calling it this is because of the fact that seeing it all together made me see that I don't like the way I've laid it out, or how the images work together. |
When looking through these images I feel as if they aren't what I wanted, trying to make digital photos look like film feels like a 'cop-out'. Nothing looks like film the way film does, so I decided to buy a small film camera (Nikon LiteTouch 70W) for £8 off of Ebay, and I took that with me out and about as it fit in my pocket and shot two rolls of film over two weeks, the photos below being the result.
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