As a child I have always been fascinated by models either aeroplanes or soldiers and I would spend hours making scenarios and dioramas for these to play with and this has stayed with me throughout my life. Recently I discovered model photography and I now bring my childhood dreams to life in a new digital world. I build model representations of war scenarios from scratch and photograph them in a way that brings them to life. I find model making very therapeutic and satisfying and get a very real buzz when they turn out exactly as I want them to. Even though these models are classed as still life I still find ways to give the images movement, mood and a sense of authenticity.
I don’t think that there are any ethics involved with trying to make models look like real life, in other words you are not trying to pull the wool over peoples eyes by trying to pass the images off as real life. Model making is like performing a play, you build your set and then produce your players and build all the props and backdrops. You are the sole story writer and producer of your play, the story line can be from an event in real life or just plain fantasy. The art of making some of these models look real is just pure skill, passion and enthusiasm for something that person loves doing, so model making is just an extension of a theatre production but in miniature and is intended to astound rather than mislead people.
I got back into model making quite recently by accident after attending a class at college when we were shown images by a model photographer by the name of Felix Hernandez. These images were like a red rag to a bull and as I abandoned my flowers and landscapes and decided to think outside the box and get out of my comfort zone and create something that has my signature on it. I love to photograph in close up because I like detailed objects and the more detailed the better and I think that if you create your own style of working you will get others trying to emulate your work instead of you trying to emulate theirs.
Going back to Felix Hernandez, he has been a professional photographer since the age of thirteen, which is a feat in itself. Like myself his inspiration came from his childhood imagination. He was a lonely child and grew up in his bedroom making models with his toys, he is now what we would call a Nerd! He spends weeks and even months building models and dioramas and he won’t photograph them until they are exactly right. He is a perfectionist at his craft and his images are absolutely stunning, here are a few examples.
This is one of his images that first caught my eye and it portrays a German soldier wrestling with his conscience. I thought that this was a very poignant image because there must have been hundreds of German soldiers who didn’t agree with what they were asked to do and this to me really doe’s tell a very sad story. I took an idea from this image that was also telling a story and I labelled it as a death squad returning from the woods after committing murder outside Auschwitz and as you can see, this picture doe’s tell a story because even these soldiers seem a bit dissolutioned with what they have just done. Even though theses are models they still invoke emotion when you add a title to them or a story line which brings them to life.
This is an image of the car that was used in the film Ghost busters which he made from scratch. He has perfected every tiny detail even down to installing lights in the car.
Once again he has used the two vehicles from the TV show, The Dukes of Hazard. To get the General Lee leaping over the squad car it is placed on a wire underneath the vehicle and then bent into the required pose. Again the attention to detail is phenomenal even down to the dirt on the tires and body panels. For the exhaust fumes he used cigarette smoke to add authenticity to his model.
Hernandez creates models for some very prestigious firms such as Mattel, Volks wagon and Audi to name but a few.
These are the still life images that I used to take until I turned my attention to building models.
These are what I would term as typical still life subjects, nice to look at but the word still is the problem for me because these objects don’t tell a story or have any movement to them. These are what I would term as wall hangings, the type of thing you would find maybe in an office or a waiting room in some dreary solicitors. To me still life is all about putting life into an inanimate object without actually moving it and the skill is in the detailing. I think that the detailing in a still life is the most important part of the image because it is the detail that draws you in and the more you can see, the more you want to see.
Some model makers work with a tremendous gift for detail and can almost make their work look real, in fact you would argue that it was real if you didn’t know that it was a model and one of these modeler's is a man called Micheal Paul smith, this man was a legend but unfortunately he passed away last year.
This is Micheal Paul Smith and he is famous for recreating an entire fictitious town from his imagination in incredible detail and this work was called Elgin Park.
To look at this image you would be excused for thinking that this was a photograph from the 1950’s, this is in fact a model shot in the town against a live background or in situe. This is a prime example of what people would call deception by trying to trick people into thinking that this was a original image from the fifties but in fact this is an awesome feat of illusion of fooling the camera as well as the eye called forced perspective.
And this is how he did it, by placing the cars on a prepared piece of board painted the same as the road he would use perspective to photograph his cars to make then appear to be real in the same street. As soon as I get some time I’am going to have a try at this just to see how difficult or easy it is because I find it fascinating.
This image shows just how big the scale of his models are to a human hand.
Now that's my idea of still life.
Jojakim Corts and Adrian Sonderegger.
These two photographers began a project in 2012 of replicating original photographs in model form. These were images of events in history that are imprinted on peoples minds. They recreated such scenes as the last image ever taken of the cruise liner the Titanic afloat, the iconic photograph of the Hindenburg airship as it exploded in the 1930’s, the destruction of the worlds trade centre and even the first footprint of Buzz Aldrin when he supposedly stepped on to the moon. These models can take days, weeks or even months to complete.
This is a recreation of the first flight of Concord. Wow! This image couldn’t look more real if you were stood there watching this plane take off. These two guys have got a phenomenal talent for detail and I just couldn’t find any criticism about their work whatsoever, it’s just so mind blowingly perfect in every aspect.
You would be forgiven for thinking that this was the original news photograph from this event, this is the Hindenburg airship that exploded in the USA whilst refuelling. Once again this is an astounding reconstruction of this historical disaster everything has been done in meticulous detail even down to taking the image in black and white. As still life goes these are more interesting than a bowl of fruit or a vase of flowers any day.
David Levinthal.
From the 1970’s David Levinthal has been using miniature models to create photographic images of myth and fantasy and events that helped to shape the American landscape. His subjects are very varied such as, Hitler moves east, The wild west, Blackface Barbie and Modern romance. He has received national acclaim for his work in the art world which includes a National Endowment for the arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is part of permanent collections of the Museum of modern art, Houstons museum of fine art, the Smithsonian Art Museum, in fact just about every art museum in the states.
This is a beautiful recreation of the Charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo and this work is inspired by the painting, Scotland Forever by Lady Elizabeth Butler. His use of colour and lighting is exquisit and combined with the shallow depth of field really brings this image to life even though you can tell that it is a model. The detail in this image is just beyond words and it is almost as much of a masterpiece as the original painting. I think that the only criticism that I could find with some of David’s work is that on some of his models he has used gloss paint instead of matt especially on clothing which makes them look too much like plastic.
This is another of Davids images about Hitlers move to the east, I love the way he has taken this image, his use of light is brilliant and if you don’t look at it too closely you would swear that it was an original grainy black and white image from a history book. Even though all these images are from famous photographers I think that certain elements of my work can stand up to the same kind of scrutiny with the best of them and that is what I am aiming for in my work.
These are some of my images.
My work is based around a love of second world war history and this image represents the spectre of death, not wearing a cloak with a scythe but an ss uniform and a Walther P38. This image is of the jews being taken into the forest near Auschwitz and exterminated by a death squad. It’s not perfect but I think that it conveys the impact of a terrible act.
This image was an exercise in how to put movement into a static model an to experiment with making fire. I suprised myself with the fire and many people who viewed this image thought that the fire was real. Bless em.
This was my second attempt at making fire work with models and I love this image because it exceeded all my expectations. I only have one criticism and that is that I painted the pilot with gloss paint by mistake. The thing about making these models is that it makes you very ambitious and your next project has to be bigger and better than the last. My work isn’t intended to look like bits and pieces of other peoples work I am creating a style of work exclusive to myself and the only barrier that I can find to achieving this is my imagination which seems to be boundless, I find that I have a hundred idea’s a day for different model scenario’s.
I think that the fire in this image really adds to the authenticity of this scene, it gives it a kind of believable reality.
These are two images from my last project and this second image really gives you the sense of how cold it was in the winter of 1944 in the Arden forest.
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