Dinu Li/Tutorial

When the Vermeer assignment was set, we were told that it was done so by not only Sarah but also professional practitioner Dinu Li, who would at some point be coming in to talk to us about his work and to critique our work to date.


He showed us a variety of his works and projects, but the one that mostly caught my eye, and was relevant to the brief was his series: Secret Shadows



The work was an attempt to show the lives and homes of Chinese immigrants living in Britain.



As a series I think they work fairly well, however not the most impressive work I've seen but there is clearly the Vermeer inspiration which I like, especially in the sense of lighting and shadow.



I really like this image of his, and I especially like the way in which it mimics a lot of Vermeer's paintings. As a viewer I am able to appreciate greatly the compositional elements to this photograph; if we look at the positioning of the woman on the screen, and then that in relation to the window, we see that she is looking out into the outside world, much alike the image of Vermeer's below. It is quite a subtle reference to Vermeer, but I think it works particularly well.




Just a quick thought on my tutorial with Dinu...

We only had about twenty minutes to talk together, but I feel it was very valuable to my work. We discussed my images that I've shot so far and the images that I was putting forward for the steel wall critique (as seen below). He told me that he liked these images, and my idea, however he was far more interested in my latest work; 'concerning negative space'. What he particularly liked was the negative space in the image, and the general composition within the frame.

This was surprising for me as I felt this work was the weakest that I've shot so far, and so it shows how valuable an outside opinion can be. Still though I've decided I don't want to follow this route of negative space images, mainly due to the fact that I've done it time and time again in the past.

The steel wall images...