90s Mash-ups

So as part of my final piece I wanted to create three 90s mash-ups using my four most recent shoots. I felt this would be a cool and unique way to express the crazy, tacky and, quite frankly, mismatched era. I cut and collaged different body parts I felt stood out to me, until placing together these three weird and wonderful 90s manipulations...

Nike Airs and Popping Pills

So on Tuesday I completed my final shoot for my 90s project, super sad I know! I know this shoot was going to be the hardest to create as I wanted to make it seem as realistic as possible as I felt it was important to keep some aspects of it serious yet still try and recreate the 'fun' and 'carefree' feelings expressed at the time. I decided to shoot my images at Wonderland Maidstone on their 90s themed night as I wanted to use an environment most suitable for my projects. Plus I also wanted to use bright coloured lights as a main effect in some of my images.

The styling of my model was very important in this shoot as I obviously needed to incorporate my crop-top but I wanted to ensure my model was styled in clothes of which someone going to a rave or a club in the 90s would wear. I chose to put her hair up in a high side pony tail, as the sporty 'no fuss' look was very much key to the era. With her make up I didn't go to heavy as rave make-up was fairly bland until it came to eye shadow, for this I used a dusty purple. I then styled my model in silver and blue air max trainers, black fish net tights, leather hot pants, my own crop-top, a pink and blue shell suit jacket and numerous gold and silver chains. Once ready and styled we made our way to the club. First of all I took some stationary images of my model, as I wanted to make sure I had some classic fashion photography shots, where my crop-top was clear to see. After getting a tad bored of getting my model to just stand and pose I decided I wanted to experiment with some movement. For this I literally just got my model to stand under the lights on the dance floor, and dance about using cringey 90s dance moves!    There goes another friendship! 

I made my shutter speed on my camera a lot slower in order to capture the light and movement in a way in which I believe people who were taking drugs at the time might see things. I wanted the images to look slightly surreal and imperfect, hence the blurs and smudges. I'm very pleased with how my images turned out baring in mind they were very experimental. I think if I were to re-shoot my images I would try different locations as although mine was appropriate as it was 'fashion' photography I feel it would of been cool to look at it in a more documentary style!  

E Was Not For England

After having tones of fun completing my troll doll inspired photo shoot, I felt it was time I revisited the dark side of the 90s. My fourth and final theme is 'drug and rave culture' a huge topic whenever the 1990s is bought up, and it seemed only right that I looked into it and compared it with the lighthearted cover up of cheesy pop and neon colours. The first thing I looked at was the death of 18 year old school girl Leah Betts, and I have to say it made me look at the 90s in a totally different light, the 90s suddenly became a lot darker, scarier and not such a joke. Although this theme was very sad, I became fascinated with the idea of people using drugs as a way to escape the 'throw away' era, and I couldn't wait to start planning and making my final crop-top based upon it.

I wanted to use text in a black and white format in order to create the appearance of a news paper to represent the dramatic news coverage from when Leah Betts died. The text was a poem I found by poet FlowBert 'E Was Not For England' which expressed strong 'real life' emotions on drug and rave culture, and how it affects peoples lives. I took the poem and selected some words I felt important and made them bold and then created my own silk screen. I then printed the text onto my tee, I did this several times, overlapping the words to give it the messed up disorientated appearance. Im really pleased with my top, now I just need to start planning a realistic 90s rave photo shoot...