Brooke Shaden
Personal Background:
Brooke started photography in 2008, fresh out of college- in which she had been studying film. She went to temple university in Philadelphia, where she grew up, but started her photography career in LA. Her most important life event to date was founding the Light Space, “a photography school for formerly trafficked individuals, and those vulnerable to human trafficking and gender based violence”. It operates in Greece, Thailand, and Italy. Her passion to share emotion and art with the world is what keeps her going as a creator. Aside from photography, Brooke is also a motivational speaker and writer. She was born in March 1987, and is currently 34 years old.
Style:
Essentially all of Brooke's work is portrait photography. Her art is very surrealist, but it also reminds me of certain renaissance pieces, due to the richness of the color palates and slightly faded appearance. This goes hand in hand with the subjects, women in lovely dresses often incorporating nature or lots of very fine detail. Close to rococo, perhaps. Brooke herself has said she purposefully chooses filters that add lots of grime and age to the photos, in an attempt to make them appear timeless, as many pieces from this era do.
Philosophy:
To quote Brooke, “I explore death and surrealism through my photography in order to show that reality has intricate ties with fantasy. Our world is not so different from the disturbing worlds I create within my frames. I argue that my surrealistic images are even more representational of life because they contain feelings and emotions that resonate with the viewers.” Creating pieces that resonate with the soul. These pieces appear much more as personal and social works, and guide viewers into channeling their own hopes, fears, and aspirations. I think some of her pieces even appear slightly ethereal.
Influences:
This photographer has not yet influenced my work, simply due to the fact that I did not know who she was until I started this report. However, her concepts are really unique so there's a high chance I would use her as inspiration for a project in the future. Each group of photos she takes has different meanings behind it- for example her photo group ‘Night Terrors’ are inspired by just that, the hallucinations that have taken away the peace from her sleep. She talks about how the photos are an attempt at regaining power over her body and subconscious, and using that to overcome her fear.
Compare and Contrast
This photo was the hardest to set up, because of the outfit. The photo was actually taken in front of a white wall, and I had a lot of fun editing the background and adding in the texture. I like this photo as a whole, but I’m not a big fan of how I look in it. I think the biggest difference overall is the posing- Brookes’ arm is slightly out, leaving a gap between her midside. She also is raising her chin up more (I don’t have the jawline for this) which I was scared to do simply because I didn’t want the skull to fall off my head. Her skull, which I believe is a cow also covered her eyes and lacks horns, but we only had a deer skull available to use. This picture was taken using a camera timer and the watchful eye of my friend Asta :)
The hardest part of taking this photo was finding a big enough tree to take the photo at. This happens to be the large tree in the field at Leslie Science (and Nature) Center. I did end up editing on a bit of a gap in the tree, like the original photo, but quite frankly it still was not wide enough to have a significant gap. I think this photo is my favorite, and it took the longest overall to edit. I cropped the photo, replaced the entire background with a base green color that had a central gradient. I added a one of Brooke's filters over the entire photo, leaving only the dress unedited, and then worked on blurring the edges of the background to add a fog-like appearance. I probably could have made the dress more of a yellowish- tone similar to the original photo, but I honestly like the contrast of the white dress with the surroundings, especially because my background is also more vivid than hers (not on purpose, I just didn't want to color drop from the photo). The biggest difference here is the presence of the roots, and although this saddens me there wasn't much to be done about it.
Definitely my least favorite photo, purely because of how I look in braids. The editing on this one drove me insane- I had a couple different ideas on how to do the paint texture, but I ended up layering it over with painterly brushes instead of using a actual photo of paint. (which was considered) Her photo has much more of a yellow-green hue to it than mine. I didn’t want to replicate the paint strokes exactly, not only because I don’t think I have the ability to do that, and also because it adds a tinge of individuality. This photo, to me, is the most accurate to Brookes’ out of the three.
Artist Statement
I strongly enjoyed both the process of taking these photographs, and also the time spent editing them! Brooke has so many stunning photographs I struggled to decide which I wanted to recreate, but at the end it came down to what pictures I thought I could feasibly do, as many of them I would be hard pressed to find a accurate outfit or setting to do the picture in, and my editing skills are just not up to par. As a whole, I like the way my photos turned out, my only issue with them Is how I look- which is much more on me than the photographs. My favorite is discoveries, as it can be connected to my passion for nature. I like how the background is used to bring a tinge of surrealism to the photo.