DEXTer
NAVY
Zhamak Fullad is a photographer based in Toronto. She is best known for her rugged street-style photography. The type of photography in which Fullad usually photographs in is portraiture, a main characteristic of her photography is the way that she very carefully composes and stylizes her photographs yet they all look candid. Fullad follows the theme of Identity as she explores and composes her photographs in a flowing, natural free way. This links to youth culture as the free flowing nature of her photographs represents the freedom that you gain during teenage years. The overall composition of her work is well thought out but looks natural, as if she is capturing a snapshot of one of her core memories.
The location in which I can see Fullad usually shoots in is outside in simplified backgrounds with one focus but sometimes a group of people in one frame. She usually uses dark backgrounds with an object or wall in the back, similar to Sharna Osborne, highlighting her model with different tones of lighting. In every photograph, I can see that Fullad ensures that the main focus of her photograph remains her model, this makes her photography easy to spot due to her use of colour, clothes and setting. I can see that Fullad uses different compositions to highlight different parts of her photograph. One of the main ways that Fullad captures her images in is portraiture, again, highlightin her model and ensuring to the viewer that they are the main focus. In my opinion, the tone in which she photographs in shines a positive, hectic and 'free flowing' atmosphere into her work. I think that when doing this, Fullad represents the freedom of being a teenager. There is also a lot of negative space in her work, 'spacing' out the model from their surroundings, similar to the euphoric feeling of becoming a teenager.
When I first looked at Zhamak Fullad's work I was taken back by her use of film photography to represent the freedom of her composition. I was also excited from the amount of negative space that she leaves in her photographs, giving me many opportunities of collage and experimentation when replicating her photographs. I was also intrested by her uses of overlay and angles. In some of her photographs, Fullad uses angles that replicate the 'fish eye lense', again, creating negative space around her models. I am intrigued on taking the more simplistic side of her work and expanding on that in future photo shoots to create more complicated developments.
In my opinion, Fullad's work exemplifies the feeling of bieng a teenager. Her use of film and flash make her photographs look vintage and modernistic at the same time. This creates an oppurtunity for the person looking at her work use their imagination to create a scenario or memory that one of her images have captured. There is also a sense of realism in her work as her photographs have a sense of freedom makes her photographs have an element of suspended movement. She also explores her surrounding by using lo-fi quality into her images, highlighting not only her model but the harsher side of her settings. I think that her work does not have a particular message that she may be trying to project, unlike the other photographers that I have explored. I think this because of the loose feeling that her compositions project, making it seem like organized chaos.
Fullad stood out to me because of her use of film. I think that the vintage quality of her photography follows the 'trends' of youth culture. Projecting the feeling of having no responsibility, just like you do as a young teenager. It also projects the feeling of euphoria and happiness as most of her models are seen with a mutual facial expression but with bright coloured clothes or makeup. Overall, I think that her photographs link to my concept youth culture as she depicts her images as if they were a core memory and I believe that as a teenager, your main want is to create those euphotic memories to look back on as you get older.