Portraits: Creative Spaces

Portraits: Creative Spaces is two series of photographic portraits of artists in their creative environments, produced for the book Making Great Illustration (AC Black, 2011), and subsequently exhibited at the International Festival of Literature, Plymouth, and the University Gallery, Nanjing, China (both 2011). Liggins was invited by Jo Davies, the book’s author, to make photographic portraits of artists in their working environments. Liggins she used the project to develop two contrasting series: (1) detailed subject-in-their-environment photographs achieved digitally from a conventional photographic viewpoint, and (2) development of her baroque photographic aesthetic using low-tech plastic camera technology. The value of the contrast was that it allowed Liggins to identify and accentuate the differences between the two photographic modes. Whereas the conventional perspective with high-resolution detail created a picture of illustrator and environment that is complete and that can be mined for detail, the lack of sophistication in the plastic camera meant that the image was governed by properties arising from its limitations. Obscurity and disruption were introduced, such as the darkening in the corners, and the beginnings of light dispersion as the image is stretched and blurred towards the border of the photographs, that led to a sense of the image being its own world. This contrast prompted another: the high-resolution, conventional perspective produced an objectifying gaze, while the low-tech image suggested a passing glance and evoked a sense of place through the disruptions that draw the viewer in. For examples, see the portraits on Making Great Illustration, p. 214. Her baroque portrait of artist Bedwyr Williams also accompanies the interview with Williams in volume 1 of the journal Cultural Colony Quarterly. Although Davies’s book privileges Liggins’s conventional-perspective images, the accompanying exhibitions allowed the two series to be shown side-by-side in order for the contrast to be displayed fully