LPA Student Member Luke Smith Wins Gold At AOP

Luke Smith has been crowned the AOP Student Photographer of the Year 2010.

The idea behind the single image of the naked woman falling came from reading the work of 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who spent the 1870’s deliberating this question of what is truth. Nietzsche believed that truth cannot be recognised stating that everything that is knowable is an illusion. He declared knowing always involves creating transference of meaning which people associate with metaphors. The reason that all knowledge involves metaphors is that knowing is supposed to be “the adequate expression of an object in the subject. And since the “subject” and the “object”, the “knower” and the “known” are imagined to be radically independent of each other, knowing always demands a “transfer” or a “copy-over” from one sphere into the other. This is seen as concept formation and it is these concepts that construct our world and our reality. Nietzsche viewed this concept as the creation of illusion meaning that there are no absolutes.

I considered through the creation of this image the reality of ones world without metaphors and wanted to illustrate this through the subject being naked and falling into nothingness to illustrate ones reality without illusions. I chose the formula of a high ISO so even what you see in front of oneself begins to denigrate encasing the subject within its illusion reasserting and reaffirming that all is construction and myth.

The idea behind the series of portraits came from reading the book Dorian Gray and staying forever young. I believe we live in a culture obsessed with staying young and it is this that can generate fear and crisis for many and can create ones own vanity. The images illustrate an individual who slumps deep in the blindness of vanity consumed by his putrid futility. It shows him straining to seek anything but vacillation. As you walk through the series of images it shows him wrenching from this conviction reaching out past his abyss to what he really is. It illustrates his own image being ruptured from its crux. No longer being condemned showing his body becoming unstrung, entering a new beginning and embracing each fleeting moment , illustrating his own destruction of vanity.

Tableau photography is the genre i predominately work in and would hope to move forward with, in a career as a photographer. I have been influenced greatly by artist such as Jeff Wall, Hannah Starkey and Tom Hunter and hope that i could possibly gouge out a career similar to theirs. Within my work i like to explore the individual, how we are influenced by our world, its social issues and the impact of culture upon us.

Luke Smith LPA Portfolio