Picasso’s Light Work

Josh Sampson

The Light WorkPicasso was a Spanish painter and photographer who spent most of his adult life living in France. He grew up to be one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th Century. When ‘Life’ magazine’s Gjon Mili, a lightning innovator visited Picasso in the South of France in 1949, it was clear that a meeting between an artists and a craftsman would only end in something extraordinary. Gjon showed Picasso some of his ice-skating photographs with tiny lights fixed to the ice skater’s skates, jumping in the dark. This sent Picasso’s mind racing! He was so fascinated by it all that he took a camera into a darkened room and while leaving the shutters open, he caught light streaks with his torch swirling through space.

My TurnThis also fascinated me and at first I felt like it couldn't work as I didn't believe that a camera could pick up swirls of light as clear as Picasso presented, in a dark room. I set up my tripod so, that there would not be any motion blur from holding the camera when waiting for the shutter to close, and placed by camera on settings of:• ISO 400• F-stop 10• Shutter speed = 5 secondsI then asked my friend to make abstract shapes with the torch.Once I had chosen the most successful photographs from my camera, (an abstract one and one with writing), I placed them into photoshop and started to improve the quality of them. I did this by altering the saturation levels to give the streaks of light a soft real and not too harsh when looked directly at. I also upped the brightness levels of the overall picture so that the light work mades sure it was the focal point of the image ad changed it to Black & White.