Richard Sercombe | Photography | For arts sake

The House of Escher

Seeing a photo of the interior of the Natural History Museum in London reminded me that at college I had a great fondness for the work of M. C. Escher and I figured that if I could plan a day out to come back with as many shots of the stairs from every available angle I might be able to re-create something reminiscent of one of those drawings. With this in mind and having the best part of a very enjoyable day out I was able to construct a 20 layer photoshop file made up of the two sections of stairway in the Darwin hall. I could not resist the inclusion of the monkey on the top left and I suspect that Darwin himself would love their presence throughout his room.

The Earth Dies Screaming

I managed to combine my love of music and art together fo this one. I had always loved the sound of the original Jean-Michel Jarre album "oxygen" and I desided to take that idea down a darker path bearing in mind the current mounting climate crisis that we find ourselves. For this I used a glass sphere, a broken beer glass, a model of a skull and some autumn leaves.

Alien Reimagined

A visit to an abandoned building in Wiltshire set the scene for this one. The alien prop is only a couple of inches tall and the challenge was to capture the dark feel created by Ridley Scott for the series of Alien movies by fitting together a daylight background with the two studio controlled shots. The Majority of the soldier was done using a green screen and refine edge tool selection in Photoshop whilst the path tool was used for the Alien. After darkening and working on the background the finishing touch to pull all of the elements together was adding some smoke.

A Face in the Crowd

My love of model railway figures stems from way back to my childhood when my grandfather set up a vast expanse of railway track taking up the majority of the attic. After leaving school my interest wained somewhat with the whole thing but a recurring theme I keep coming back to is the use of model figures as props. This is a homage to one of the pioneers of the model railway. A portrait of Frank Hornby using nothing more than unpainted white figures selected from three packs of 100 all the way from china... thanks ebay!

The Method: The whole figure position was first mapped out in illustrator, including the possible shadow lengths which would be determined by the height of the figures. I colour coded the trace to reflect this and marked them out on white PVC foamex before spending a whole day super gluing them all into place before the fun part of photography could be undertaken.

The Francis Bacon Suit

This was inspired by a set of images that have stayed in my head since Art College. The screaming popes by Francis Bacon were so striking I decided to borrow an idea from a John Foxx record sleeve (the "Miles Away" single) and combine the two concepts in one. A simple double exposure was used to create the final effect.Natural lighting was used in conjunction with two flashguns to pick out some detail in the creases of the suit. The empty room with floorboards completed the effect.

The opposite of the floating planet polar co-ordinates effect in Photoshop was used to create a graphic landscape out of the docklands in London.

A polar co-ordinates featuring my current complete collection of 12" high Iron Man figures withe the additional central one added later.