Tom Napper
'Cubism and photography' 1999-2006

This is really a continuation of a previous project, 'Broken Portraits,' that was begun after studying the artists from the cubist movement and photographers such as David Hockney and Thomas Ruff. Having been disenchanted with conventional portraiture and the restrictions of 'single shot photography' I began to compose images of up to 300 close up photographs of the subject.

The idea behind the continuation of this project is to create HUGE images, to show immense detail, in a similar fashion to Thomas Ruff's work. His work confounds our expectations of discovering a person’s character through their appearance, whilst offering great physical detail, and allowing us to scrutinise the image by utilising large format prints. My pictures encourage a similar viewing experience, they become hyper-real

The overall end image usually contains a large depth of field, everything is in focus, yet because of working so close up, each individual block (or photo) has only a shallow depth of focus, enabling me to draw the viewer’s attention to something by careful focusing, yet allow the picture on a larger scale to remain in focus from background to foreground. I decided to make no attempt at interpreting characters, to purely look at the person, and so I used either natural, or soft, even lighting, similar to that used for traditional portraiture or even for copying art work.

Interest in Picasso led me to a wide variety of artists such as Georges Braque, Metzinger, Gris, Chagall, Durer and Delaunay. These artists excited me, more than many photographers I had researched and so I set to work photographing people in a way that encompassed different times and perspectives, whilst retaining detail, to satisfy my analytical side. From here I discovered how to photograph the human face from all around, nearly encompassing a full 360 degree view, enabling the images to interact with my viewers, creating the sensation of moving around the subject, but on a two dimensional surface. It became possible to see parts of the body that normally could never be seen together, the perspective is disturbing, yet very interesting.

During the construction of these images, I have learned huge amounts about Photoshop: image manipulation, colour balancing, cutting slicing etc. Despite the validity and necessity of learning to use this tool for modern photography, I still aim to create huge images, huge portraits through physically building these images from 6”x4” photos so they are better quality enlargements and of an almost unlimited size; plus I love tactile, three dimensional pictures.




Tom is a photographer based in the South-West of England. He began his photographic career with Salcombe based photographers 'Exp!osures', founded by Chris Milward and Seb Joli


   Tom Napper

   www.tomnapper.co.uk