Patrik Budenz

(IMAGE: PLACEBO ONCE MOE WITH FEELING)

Patrik Budenz is a German photographer who chooses to capture a broad range of subjects, be they alive, dead, whole cities and even drag racers.

 Here is a picture of a deceased woman, pale and sickly apart from the vivid scar down her chest post!autopsy; there are also bruises and blotches, less in focus for savour of her smooth skin and pale lips This could be the comment on death that Patrik is talking about: In this day and age, nobody wants to think about the ugliness of death and would rather romanticise the life of this woman by only capturing her pale lips damp, porous skin.

Here is an image of the sallow skin of a dead man's foot: toe tag visible. The image almost needs to be double took due to the fact that the deceased's skin look more like a leather, or an object as opposed to an actual human being. The contract -and assimilation - of the metal table offers a reflection of the cadaver. Death seems to be sterile, clean and minimalist.

However in this photograph, we are reminded that dying isn't the prettiest, and neither is the embalming process. A pale hand is set beside a bloody background: the colour contrasts metaphorically showing how the life of this individual is being drained from him. Red connoting passion. I would like to replicate this with paint.

Inside the cremation chamber, Budenz has taken a picture of a skeleton which has recently been cremated--well, so recent that it's still being cremated. The intensity of the flames and the barely-visible bones lulls the viewer into a false sense of security due to the fact that one may think that this is just a typical autumn photograph of a warm and welcoming fire, when in fact a body is being destroyed. The vivid flames also ties into the energy that my song possesses: perhaps I could try to replicate this image by taking photographs of a fire (without a body, perhaps).

Only the top of someone's head can be seen in this image. In the foreground a lab coat can be seen on the peg-line of the lab, which makes this image neither morbid, shocking or minimalist. It's actually very clinical but also very warn due to the fact that there is a higher saturation of warm colours such as beiges and oranges, which was not seen in the prior images of the corpses.

For both my digipak case and my website, I decides to use aspects of what I had seen from these images: Skin, sterility and a human figure in order give my punk album a 'posh punk' style.

In order to do this, I covered different parts of my both with white paint t make myself appear deathly pale (and I had a butt load of poster paints left from making the band masks). After that, I fiddled with the focus of my camera to create odd macro compositions.

In this picture, I took an image of my risk for a 'clean convas sort of skin pattern which could be used as a basic background on a web page or a digipak tile.

After than I took a close up image of the side of my right eye, rolling it backwards to make it appear as though I had dead, milky lenses. I also made the camera focus on the eyelashes as opposed to the cheeks or the nose.

I then took a picture of the side of my neck, focusing the lens on the nape as opposed to any other part in order to give the image some depth of focus. It's not my most favourite self-portrait, simply due to the fact that my 'stache and rough skin are obscenely visible. Still, it's an interesting texture, and would work well for the enter page of my website.

After that, I took a low angle picture of my face, as though I were lying down, and made sure that my eyes were hollowly focused in one direction (which isn't that hard - I'm a day dreamer). The nose and the right cheek are the main focus as opposed to the eyes, which the audience should focus on as an afterthought due tot he nose being aligned with the rule of thirds.

Finally, here two pictures are of my hands: covered in blotchy bits of paint. In the top image, I tried to which move my hand in order to make the image less visible. However in the bottom one, I specifically tried to capture the rough pattern on the inside of my hand.

All of the images that I have taken will be manipulated on GIMP, to be used for the website and digipaks.