Bernhard Blume

Kuchenkoller, 1985

 Blume and his wife find a great balance between the narrative context and the surreal abstraction I'm sort of aiming towards... There is a humour here which is refreshing but also quite powerful.

Sebastiao Salgado

Ed Ruscha

Rod McNicol

Discovered Rod McNicol's photography after completing Project 1, but the similarities are too obvious to let lie! These two people were suffering terminal illness at the time of the photograph, and died 2 weeks later. They hold a photograph of themselves as children, as my models did for my sequence on generation and age. The composition of the childhood photo has been mimicked in the more recent one.

Salvadore Dali and Luis Buñuel

Un Chien Andolou

1929

La Jetée

Watching this famous film in photographic theory, brings up some fascinating theories about photography and cinematography, and the problems in freezing reality, the assumed truth of a photograph, the death of time etc. beautiful imagery and a rich storyline as well.

Hans Bellmer

Totally creepy, intriguing, and in a way really beautiful in form and composition. The black and white is really effective - and the dolls themselves of course are sculpturally magnificent - Though subject matter is quite confronting, there's a lovely level of abstracted form in these images, and I understand why Bellmer chose to photograph his dolls rather than just present them as sculpture - the flattening and earie stillness is really what drives these shots for me.

Joel Peter Witkins

Witkins appropriated Las Maninas by Diego Velázquez, revealing an incredible fascination for the morbid and deterioration. He labelled his appropriation as a self portrait, and uses picasso-like characters to represent the high court - so the cultural and personal meaning behind this photograph is huge. Aside from concept and context, the image is intriguing in its own right and without reliance on the original!

Hiroshi Sugimoto

" I'm a habitual self-interlocutor. Around the time I started photographing at the Natural History Museum, one evening I had a near-hallucinatory vision. The question-and-answer session that led up to this vision went something like this: Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame? And the answer: You get a shining screen. Immediately I sprang into action, experimenting toward realizing this vision. Dressed up as a tourist, I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village with a large-format camera. As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture, and two hours later when the movie finished, I clicked the shutter closed. That evening, I developed the film, and the vision exploded behind my eyes."