Keavey Henshaw
Unit Four Photography
Thomas Hager
Examples and Analysis
Thomas Hager is a distinguished artist who has been producing pieces of art for over 20 years. His unique use of vintage photographic processes from the middle to late 1800’s reveal a twisted yet beautiful aspect on surreal photography. Drawn to these processes for their painterly aesthetic and historical contributions, he them as a perfect puzzle piece for his works, which deal with the chaos of contradiction between flesh and spirit and his investigation of organic forms in nature.
Contrast, expression and contouring help make all of Thomas Hagers 'Catharsis' portfolio of work have a creepy, surrealistic effect.
By overlaying different images in photoshop and changing the blending modes to make the two images merge into one. The contrast betwen the background image and the foreground image is also very drastic. Moving from pure black to the the skin hue saturations
In this image you can see the same pattern emerging, although the composition of this image is slightly different to the others. This on in purticular doesn't have a dramatic pose / posture of the male figure, it's rather simplistic. Composition of an image is the arrangement of the formal elements.
Another thing which is prominant in this image is the central focus, that of course also being the mans body and the lighter overlayed medical drawings. The central focus only consists of these two parts due to the fact they're most prominent.
As you can see from the image to the left again a large amoutn of contrast has been used, this in turn enhances the image and forces the audiences eye to look at the lighter parts of the image, which in this case is the human body.
The collection of images Hager has created gives off a extremely expressive feeling, he's done this purly by overlaying one image over another, and the fact the secondary image is medical and anatomically correct images from 18th centuray books and journals it adds to the surreal and creepy feeling.
Hager has returned to the dramatic pose in this image even more so than his other creations. I expect this has been done to match the posture of the medical drawings.
The relative and matching posture of both the drawing and the man give off a " out of body " feeling. Some may interperate this as the inner workings of the body being released and leaving it's former self.