THOMAS BARBEY
A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it isn't open.
Thomas Barbey
Thomas Barbèy grew up in Geneva, Switzerland. For 17 years he designed posters for bands and then moved to Milan to be a fashion photographer. He was originally called Tom Hooker but when he moved to Los Angeles and got married, he changed his name to Thomas Barbey, which he is most known for now. He combines multiple images digitally in a way that shows that in an opening, there is something there you don't expect, for example, a city in underneath a man's shirt.
MY RECREATIONS
I really like this photo as it is a very precise recreation, down to the tiny features such as camera positioning and colour tints. I have made it as similar to Thomas' work as possible and I think I succeeded in doing so. But, instead of having the opening in his shirt with a city inside it, I have altered it to add a bit more of my own personality and style by instead inserting a shot I have previously taken in Yosemite. I think this shows some slight binary opposites between a city skyline in his shot and a nature landscape in mine, to create some contrast and diversity between the two. Just like Thomas' work, I have made the entire image black and white but added just a slight tiny of sepia colour so the colour is exact to what he used. All pictures used have been taken by me.
For this image, I have taken an extreme close up image of my dad's mouth and cut out the inside of his mouth with Photoshop CC but left in his teeth. Thomas also left in his teeth and I think it frames the overall image and brings in slight realism to the abstract side of this image. I have then inserted a picture of a flowing river from a view like you're looking down while inside of it, as I looked at Thomas' work and noticed he uses looking-down onto a situations with gradual vanishing points, and this one has the same. I also think the river works well inside the mouth as it also links in with the idea with saliva inside of the mouth, which again brings some slight realism into the abstract element of the final image. My dad also has a beard in this image, and I have upped the contrast of the picture on photoshop so I think it makes the photo slightly more interesting and unique and again frames the enture photo and draws your eye to the center of the mouth, which is the entire photo's intentions.
For this image, I have taken an extreme close up of my Mum's eye. I inspected John's work further and used his technique with the eye, so I overlayed an image over her entire eyeball and lowered the opacity so it seems that that is what she is looking at at that moment in time. I decided to choose a photo of the scenario of watching a couple get married as this is a stereotypically emotional event to witness, but I also photoshopped in a tear drop to make the audience think why she is crying - whether it could be happiness or sadness. Again, I changed the entire final image into black and white and added a slight sepia tint to it so that it matched the colour style of all Barbey's work.
For this image, I took an extreme close up of my mum's mouth to use, using the same technique of cropping out the visible inside of the mouth but not the teeth to frame the photo in its entirety but still interpret Barbey's style and model poses. For the photo I used on the inside, with the same as the last mouth image, I chose a photo where you're looking down on the situation and there is a vanishing point included, so this time I used a photo of a road or highway that I took. I think using this, as it has no relation to a mouth whatsoever, makes the overall picture a lot more abstract and in the style of Barbey's photography. I again desaturated all of the picture and added a slight sepia tone to replicate the colours used in all of Thomas' work. I also the contrast for the road picture as it made the road a lot more darker, therefore drawing your eye to it and accentuating the abstract element of the image.