Artist - Vilde Rolfsen

After my four texture shoots, I found my man-made shoot in particular to be very interesting and successful, which got me thinking about man-made things in greater depth, and in looking around for man-made things to shoot, I came up with a number of ideas that didn't originally come to mind. Of course, the immediate implication of man-made is buildings, bricks, metal, machines and so on. However, after delving into the world of man-made photography, I came across Vilde Rolfsen, who shoots the inside of plastic bags to look somewhat like a surreal landscape, as shown below:

Rolfsen is a Canadian modern art photographer based in Oslo, who hopes to show the abstract beauty of something as simple and waste synonymous as a plastic bag from a macroscopic perspective.

I was immediately drawn in by these images; because of the type of bag, white and opaque, the light from outside the bag gives it a misty feel, and coupled with the texture and shape of the bag, makes for an image that loses its identity as a plastic bag and just becomes a surreal landscape or fog. I also noticed that because of the colour and depth of field, some of Rolfsen's images look reminiscent of digital scans of the ocean surface such as the one below:

As you can see, the ocean scan bares some similarities with the depth and shapes of Rolfsen's work (although very abstract): this bares no relevance to my project but is just something that sparked my interest further.

Moving on though, I decided to use Rolfsen's work as my inspiration, and I plan to produce a shoot of similar plastic bags, trying to capture the same sort of shapes and overall design, with an emphasis on depth - as in the bag should seem larger and deeper than it is in reality, as is the case with Rolfsen's images.