Ashmeen
Hoonjan
Photography Unit 22
Portraits
Benoit Courti is a professional modern photographer, who specialises in black and white photography. He is a french photographer living in paris, who was fascinated in photography since childhood. He originally took a career as a music composer, however he then went into photography in 2010 and put his focus into deep black and white photographs.
About Benoit Courti;
Here I have researched Benoit Courti, with annotated photographs in detail.
Benoit Courti
Benoit Courti is a highly successful French photographer who expresses black and white photography by really defining the main colours in the photographs, deep black and crystal white. This is his signature effect within his photography that signifies Benoit Courti. This photograph really signifies the smoke from his cigarette; everything is slightly out of focus except for the smoke. Now this sets a story line within the image; seen as thought the smoke is the only subject totally in focus it makes it stand out and becomes the focus point, this suggests that he must obviously smoke a lot for it to be the centre of attention, but that the smoke is taking over his own identity, hence the blurred face. Benoit Courti has effectively only shown the face and his hand, as well as the smoke. His shoulders are not to be seen, this suggests that Courti purposely dressed the subject in black so that it is merged into the background and cannot be seen. The composition of this photograph is typical for a portrait photograph because it is close up and some of his head has been cropped out, however this creates a means of mystery to the subject in the photograph because not all of his body is seen. Hands is a priority in Benoit’s photographs because hands tell a story of their own, they are significant in their own ways, creating sculptures with the way it is shaped. Benoit uses this technique in this photograph successfully, it is out of focus but this goes well with this image because this enhances the smoke even more.
Benoit has a whole section on black and white photography; this is just one of them that really stood out for me. This image is subtle and light, in terms of the blur on the face, this signifies that not much is going on in the image physically, but there is morally. Benoit has done this because not all of his images have a ‘sadness’ to them and this is one of the few that do. The teardrop complements the ‘sadness’, this is because the eye is closed, showing that the subject must be upset. The composition of the image has been altered so that only the one eye and half of the nose is shown, however the right side of the picture is slightly more out of focus than the left side, but it is not too out of focus that we cannot tell what it is. I do like the subtle feel in the image creating a shadowing effect on the subject which really does emphasis the ‘hurt’ aspect in the picture, which is exactly what Benoit was trying to get across in this specific image. The subject is hard to tell whether it is man/woman or a child. But I believe that it is a child; this is enhanced by the soft features o the subject that really emphasise that 'vulnerable' child like look. Benoit experiments with different emotions in his photographs and he says that he brings out the person within the photograph into the frozen shot, but he also shows some of himself within the photograph. This is creative as the reader can examine into Benoit's life as well as the image itself.