Earlier today I took more photographs of Tisiphone, the first of the three Furies — many thanks to Dawn for modelling again.
I’ve got a couple of the photographs up in the artwork section already, so please have a look and let me know what you think.
Last weekend I took the photographs of Megaera, the second of the three Furies — many thanks to Alice for modelling (again!).
I managed to shoot 668 photos — it’s simply amazing how differently you approach photography when you’re working with a digital camera (a Panasonic Lumix G1 — not quite officially a digital SLR, but as close as makes no difference) that allows you to take several thousand photographs, compared to having to mentally keep track of how many rolls of film you have to hand.
Anyway, if you click the thumbnail you’ll see the first of the photographs after a dose of heavy manipulation. I’m quite enjoying manipulating a photograph until it’s almost a painting, playing with the lights & shadows to create an impossible Baroque chiaroscuro.
I’ll be adding some more manipulated photographs to the artwork galleries over the next few days.
A very quick post to say that you can follow the progress of this project (and of my other projects) by following me on Twitter.
Just go to twitter.com/lazcorp and click ‘follow’.
My friend Michael Kemp just pointed me at an interpretation of the Furies that I hadn’t seen before — Slavko Vorkapić’s excellent montage sequence for the 1934 film Crime Without Passion (written and directed by Charles MacArthur & Ben Hecht).
Slavko Vorkapić (1894–1976) was a Serbian-American film director and editor, but perhaps better known as a Special Effects Technician.
Filmreference.com has an entry for him which mentions this fantastic sequence:
When working with filmmakers of an adventurous frame of mind, Vorkapich seized the opportunity to introduce expressionist elements into his work, and some of his most imaginative effects occur in the montages he devised, working closely with cinematographer Lee Garmes, for Hecht and MacArthur’s Crime without Passion.
The opening credits show three winged Furies darting through the canyons of New York to seize at random upon their victims; when crooked lawyer Claude Rains shoots the dancer who is blackmailing him, the Furies emerge from a drop of her blood as it falls in slow-motion and wheel vengefully out into the night, feasting their eyes on the violence of the city.
I just love the way the Furies are visualised in this montage. Spectacular!
Just for the record, the Furies were played by Dorothy Bradshaw, Fraye Gilbert, and Betty Sundmark.