Thomas Barbey

Thomas Barbey grew up in Geneva, Switzerland and has been a photographer for over twenty years. He has recently adopted a style of photomontage and has had a big role in surrealism. This genre has allowed his work to become very distinctive from other forms of photography. He specialises in taking our ideas of reality and showing them in a different light. He combines images in a way that make his effects more believable, allowing more people to be engrossed in the hyperreality that has been set up.

I like this image because it has a child-like innocence about it. We can see a simple technique has been used in order to compress the focal length to make the image appear as if he is playing with the cars. The child aspect of the image comes from the way that he looks like a child playing with toy cars. This could be a great way of showing what the child is imagining as he moves the fake cars around. This is a great example of hyperreality as we can see it from a child's perspective and imagination.

This image is interesting because it plays with perspective. Barbey takes our ideas about gravity and everyday life and changes them as a way to create his own hyperreality. Barbey achieves the effect so convincingly that he manages to make the initial viewing of the image even more puzzling for the audience.

This image plays with hyperreality on different scales. There is a contrast between something as big as a mountain range to something as small as a table cloth. The seamless blend of the two scales cause the hyperreality to become more convincing and amazing as a result. The image is interesting because it takes something as common as a table cloth and makes it extraordinary by bringing a unique perspective to the image.

Within this image, Barbey changes one aspect which causes the entire image to appear distorted. Again, the effect is made to look so seamless that at first glance some might miss the fact that the entire background is Flipped on its side. What could be just a picture of a person looking through a telescope is immediately made other worldly as he changes just one aspect within the image.

Summary:

Thomas Barbey has a very effective style of surrealism that looks plausible compared to some other photographers who aim to change all aspects of their images in order to create a surrealist effect. Barbey achieves this by keeping the changes in his images relatively simple, often relying on one or two aspects of his images. He likes to play with perspective within images in a way that often appears seamlessly within the image. His sparing use of convincing techniques causes his images to have a visual style like no other. I am a massive fan of the way in which he uses ordinary sights and uses them as a platform for otherworldly effects. I could utilise this process as a means of creating extraordinary yet believable sights out of everyday life. This will be the base for my hyperreality.