Artist Statement
As an artist and a person in general, I have always been interested in color. I appreciate all types of color, but bold vibrant colors are the most beautiful to me. I recently took a class where I learned how to use lighting inside a studio setting in my photography. My favorite part of that class was portrait photos and specifically portraits with dark shadow on the body. So, for this project I wanted to combine these two things together to make photographs that are interesting and maybe a little abstract. For these photos though, the shadows on the body are not natural shadows. They are artificial shadows that I either created with paper or used found objects that cast something interesting on the body of my models. I was inspired to do this by a TV show about a modeling competition. One of their photo shoots was all about unnatural shadow cast on the model’s body and how it changed the way they need to pose to make the shot work. For my photos though, I wanted to focus on the body of my models and how the shadows could distort what the audience sees and used different colors to further emphasis what parts of the body the viewer is seeing. I also experimented with movement to see what that did to the body as well. So, in short, my project is about the weird and the beautiful meshed together as one to create something new out of the human body.
Keely Bell Photography 