Hanna Lovinda

For my project in photography 'Body Parts' I want to look at de-facing people or disguising them. I first looked at using films in the dark room and manipulating them, by either covering up people's faces (like a mask), or using techniques such as the burn tool.

Now I want to look more into masks, or ways in which you could incorporate disguises with fashion photography.

The above photograph stood out to me because the people in the photographs are standing normally and acting as most people / friends do when huddling for a group photograph, (even though it is a married couple and the photographer Hanna Lovinda in the shot.) This, added with the weird animal masks makes a very unemotional, blank and stern kind of photograph, even though the people behind the masks are probably smiling.

I like this idea of taking away the faces of people because it adds an element of the unknown which adds a lot of interesting feautures to the photograph, because people always want to know what facial expressions people have. This is how we know how others are feeling.

I would like to experiment with this idea in my own project, but maybe add the element of fashion because I think it works quite well using pretty dresses/ clothes with weird and animalistic masks, as it adds juxtaposition. You can see this when you look at the bride in the photograph alone.

Photo taken from Hanna's blog