Week 11 was another artist spotlight, this week with our focus on a Chinese photographer, Fan Ho. Chelsea says,
Fan Ho was not afraid of strong light and shadows – his work bent whatever light was given to him in graphic and compositionally unique ways. His depiction of everyday life was elevated to fine art with silhouettes, rim lighting, and bright backlit glows around his subjects.
I’m not sure if I’m reading too much into his work, but in thinking about this week’s prompt, I felt like there was a subtle politicism and subversiveness to many of the photos that he took. The photo above is in that regard, perhaps too on-the-nose; I can’t help but feel that he would probably have a different take on the message.
In any case, Fan Ho also did quite a lot of composite work; a number of his photos employ silhouettes of people or landscapes overlaid on top of another shot. I initially did not plan on doing a composite photo for this entry, but after experimenting with a number of crops and edits of just the flag, really felt like something was missing. So I dug wayyyyy back into my archives and found a shot I took of a MiG-17 on display at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, and blended it into the shot. I think the effect is quite striking, even if it is not subtle.
I feel compelled to note that the MiG-17 is a relatively old aircraft, and was not actually ever used by the Ukrainian Air Force (at least, not according to the Wikipedia article on the subject), but they do have a number of MiG-29s which can trace their lineage back to the MiG-17 and the Vietnam War.
Also, on the photographic front, I experimented with a two-tone color gradient for this shot, with a blue tint on the top and yellow on the bottom to mimic the Ukrainian flag, but decided that was slightly too over-the-top, and settled on a uniform sepia tone instead.
Слава Україні!
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