Tamara Lichenstein

One of my favourite photographers at the moment is Tamara Lichenstein, a photographer I found through Carpaccio Magazine. What I find really fascinating about her work is that all her work is film based. She mainly uses disposable cameras, which I find unusual as she isn't bothered about having a clear and perfect image; her priorities lie in the content and connotations. Because they are all film-based and it is a dying medium, there is a certain nostalgic and naive quality of the images she creates, something which I try to recreate in my digital photography and post production.

I really love this image, mainly because of the vivid colours, and the fact it was taken on expired film; a medium most photographers wouldn't run the risk and spend the money on using. This just shows that she is willing to take risks with her art, which is something I think is very important in order to find an identity as an artist, something I don't do enough.

These two images were created by not winding up the camera, therefore creating a double exposure. I particularly like the second image as the colours of the flowers in one exposure and the water in the second make a really bright interesting portrait.

After admiring Tamara's work for a while now, I have decided to be more experimental with my photography work and am going to experiment with disposable cameras and possibly double exposures with the cameras allows it. I bought a couple of disposable cameras from a pound store near where I live and I plan to take images of whatever I see that I find interesting. This could be nature, still life, portraits anything. With one camera I just want to play around with effects and taking interesting portraits, preferably with different people each time. The other camera I plan to use for my next submission for Carpaccio Magazine, based on the topic of our fears. This will be an interesting subject for my film based images as they will have a naivity about them yet still have the fears in the subject, creating surreal and haunting images.