Eimear Bradley
I have always had a strong passion and love for cinema and theatre which influences my work and projects. Working as the ‘behind the scenes’ photographer for TU Dublin’s production of the musical Legally Blonde, opened a new avenue for me to the niche area of theatrical performance documentation. This passion for capturing the performing arts through the photographic image has driven my practice forward and provoked me to respond to artists such as Alfred Hitchcock in my own work. I enjoy reprocessing and overlapping elements of photography, cinema, and theatrical performance in order to create new meaning, and comment on what I see in the world.
MacGuffin
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MacGuffin is the title of my graduation project. Since having a strong passion and love for cinema, I wanted to incorporate these elements into my final project. This project studies Alfred Hitchcock's use of the plot device called the "MacGuffin" that drives the characters of the film forward but has no real significance or effect on the plot of the film itself. This project highlights a total of twenty four examples from a series of twenty four Hitchcock films, spanning 1929-76. Each book contains a series of photographs taken from these films, with each book having an assigned theme or code that runs throughout Hitchcock's films.
In my dissertation I ask the question, is the essence of cinema found in the still image? I interrogate the characteristics of cinematic photographs and how the construction of such images create the illusion of a cinematic setting. Taking specific art photographers who work in the cinematic mode, Alex Prager and Gregory Crewdson, I ask what is it that makes these photographs evoke certain essential characteristics of cinema. Drawing on ideas by George Baker and David Campany, I explore the nature of the relationship between photography and cinema, particularly in relation to the role of narrative. I discuss what goes on behind the scenes in order to create these elaborate images and where the cinematic mode of photographic image-making is currently heading.
Photobook
Some content about the book and how it was produced, etc. Both the image of the book and aa link below the text will open a new window to show the pdf therein.