How to write up your research

1. How to write up your research Example provided here. Task: Research 2 concept photographers. Structure this using topic headings: idea, audience, message, symbols, emotions. Why? A2 Assessment Objectives: AO2: explore through detailed analysis how media products communicate meaning. A04: present research findings and conclusions. A02: communicate an informed understanding of media codes and conventions.

2. How to write up your researchTASK: Research 2 concept photographers.

3. A2 Assessment Objectives:

4. SHOOTING CONCEPT PHOTOGRAPHS IDEA - The idea comes first. MESSAGE - Analyse the “message” you want to convey. SYMBOLS - Conceptual photography makes use of graphical symbols. AUDIENCE - Concept shooting involves careful consideration of your Audience. How will your message touch them most powerfully? EMOTIONS - Concept shooting is centred on emotions, and the telling of a story in its message.

5. What to include? • You can include more of one area ( like techniques) or less of another if need be.

6. RUUD VAN EMPEL Biography • He was born in Breda in 1958. Currently works and lives in Amsterdam. He studied at the Sin Joost Fine Arts Academy in Breda. On leaving college he worked in film and TV set design. • Initially Empel created images of white children in forests. He was accused of racism. He then considered making images of black children in similar settings. He found that these images produced a very different effect on the viewer.

7. Influence: painter: Henri Rousseau

8. idea The idea was to do something with beauty. Beauty has been a taboo in art for such a long time; I didn't feel like making something that might look very artistic but in fact was ugly. To me, both nature and the innocence of children is something beautiful. Children are born innocent into a cruel and dangerous world. I wanted to do something with that idea. Message The images of innocent black children contradict western media images of black children as ill or in need, often seen in the western press. ‘I received some positive responses from black audiences, who said they liked the way my work portrays black children in a respectful and beautiful way rather than as a victim’.

10. SYMBOLS • We are looking at an Eden that resembles a luxuriant jungle, exclusively peopled by children. A world that does not exist but which is there, really there, terribly there and awesomely beautiful. Too beautiful perhaps, because it does not exist.

11. Approach and Techniques • This is how the artist goes about creating these images: First he collects all the features he needs by shooting a variety of young models in his studio and by subsequently wandering through Dutch forests, in search of fine leaves, perfect branches and the right waters. Only to tear it apart and spend weeks reconstructing it all until both the person and the setting match his desired standard of photo-realism. • In his digital handling of photography, van Empel has developed a unique working method. From hundreds of photographic fragments, he compiles images that are genuinely lifelike in their appearance but conjure up a world that has never existed in this form.

12. Techniques • Digital painting is his working style. Collaging: cutting and pasting – with a computer allows him to create his hyper-real images. These woods are not an eden of innocence. • ‘I gave the girl puppet-like eyes to make her innocence come off even stronger and gave her an almost fairytale kind of forest. But as an effect of the photo-montage technique it ended up looking strange and somewhat frightening. I liked this and decided to explore it further’.