New Visions of Primark

Glowing Balance

Balance and Lines

After the in class review of the different elements of photography, and after learning a bit more through our readings/module, my goal for this assignment was to play around and capture these elements in a visually striking way. My original idea was to photograph the GlitchKraft closing party, but given the digital nature of the art, coupled with the fact that the event took place at a gallery with plain, white walls, I was struggling to find and capture good shots.  So, I ditched this idea, and decided to take photos at Primark instead. 

Descending/Ascending

Leading Lines Up and Down

I had never been to Primark before, so I didn’t really have a concept or idea in mind when I chose it as my location. However, from walking past the store many times, I knew it was really big, so I figured I could find something to work with. My approach to shooting photos was mainly to capture as many interesting shots, textures, angles as possible as I walked through the store, incorporating as many photography elements as I could. At first, taking the photos was kind of mindless. I had no driving concept or theme. Nothing in the environment and none of my pictures were evocative of anything in particular. It wasn’t until I made my way to the top floor, after taking a picture of the lighting above the escalators, that I felt a sort of sci-fi, almost alien feel to what I had captured. The photos I captured next, which didn’t end up in my presentation, were details of children’s shirts that had Buzz Lightyear and the NASA logo on it. From then on, I decided that I would look for objects or scenes to communicate a sci-fi feel. Since it was my first time in Primark, I also felt like this theme tied in nicely to the idea that I myself was an alien in this new space, exploring it for the first time. 

Leading Line of Lights

Buzz Lightyear detail

In narrowing down my images to the final 8, I mainly chose photos that met the rules for the assignment, while capturing the variety of photography elements that we had learned about. But, because of my approach of taking as many pictures as possible, there was a lot of back and forth among the final selection and the many runner-ups. My final decision came down to technicalities: I chose the photo that captured elements that I was able to articulate. Also, as I went through my pictures, I noticed that a color scheme started to emerge, as a lot of Primark’s signage are in various shades of blue. This was also a consideration when choosing my final photos because I wanted my presentation to feel cohesive. Ultimately though, I wanted pictures that were interesting, which is why I was excited to hear that some of our classmates said there was a cinematic feel to them.

Details In the Fabric

Symmetry in Three

I really enjoyed post-production, as I feel it allowed me to create dramatically different images from the original and really exaggerate the different elements in the photo. In fact, some of the photography elements that were captured would not have been there without the post-production process. I played around with saturation a lot, using the sponge tool to desaturate certain parts of a picture and oversaturate others, in order to transform Primark into a glowing, radioactive, Tron-like world. I also utilized the burn and dodge tools a lot. You can see my use of the burn tool really well in the picture where the word Primark is glowing in the center. If you look at the original version of this picture, that middle part of the picture is pretty insignificant in relation to the rest of the subjects captured. I wanted this to be my picture where the subject is in the center, so I used the burn tool to dark out the edges, and used the sponge tool to oversaturate the word “Primark,” so it would be apparent that that is the subject of the photo. You can see the before and after for this picture below. I also applied some cropping and basic color corrections across the board.

Center shot: before

Center shot: after 

As for the presentation, when I queued up the photos that I was going to use, I knew I wanted the escalator shot and the circular lighting shot shown together as a pair. Then I realized, instead of having just one large picture, I could make both of them large to accentuate the idea that I was ascending into another world, leveraging the leading lines in those pictures to help tell that story. I also knew that I wanted to continue pushing myself to make creative uses of our space. At first, there was nothing particularly thematic about using a corner space; I just thought it would be novel. I knew I wanted to place the two large pictures in the center, but it took some experimenting with the smaller photos to finally land on my final presentation. I played around with creating vertical columns of pictures on either side of the center ones, moving on to asymmetrical formations, but none of them spoke to me in any particular way. I ended up going with the horizontal rows of pictures because it created enough space between the pictures so that each one could be observed individually without being crowded by the next, while still being connected to the other photos as one whole presentation. I didn’t even realize until the very end, when the pictures were in place, that the use of the corner and the presentation as a whole also touched upon the concept of leading lines, with the side pictures leading your line of sight to the large, center ones.

The final presentation