Platon

Platon

Platon was born in London in 1968 but was raised in the Greek isles until his family returned to England in the 1970's.

I really like Platon's portrait work, I love the amount of contrast the image has and i like how most of his shots are close ups of a person, so the face is the main thing in the frame. 

The series of images that is my favorite of his is the 'portraits of power' series. This series is a collections of images of people who are considered powerful and influential, examples would me Michelle and Barack Obama, George. W Bush and up to 97 other world leaders like this. 

Platon published all 100 of these images in a book, this book was actually the second book he had published. 

One thing i did notice about the series of images is that almost all of the leaders who featured in this series were male. Only 4 of which were female. I'm not entirely sure if that was something he was trying to put across at all but it is definitely something that i noticed straight away.

I have chosen three images from the series to put forward to analys. You will notice that i have chosen to use images that also have who the person is, where they are a world leader, when they were born and also the date in which they have been in office since. 

I really like the portrait of Dalia Grybauskaite, I think it looks really powerful. I think this is mainly down to knowing that she is president of Lithuania but also because if the pose she is in, also the way she appears to be staring right into the camera which in return means when you look at the photo she appears to be staring right at you. I like how close Platon has got to Dalia i think the close up shot leaves less room for a background to distract the eye from the main focus. 

The portrait of Muammar Qaddafi oozes power to me. The way the camera is pointing up towards him showing that Platon was clearly at a lower angle, maybe crouching. I really like the use of the whole torso and head in this photo. That combined with the low angle shot and the fact his head is tilted a little up whilst looking down makes him look powerful, if this was to be displayed on a wall on a large scale it would definitely look as though Muammar was looking down at you. I also like how his clothes are gold. Gold is always linked to wealth and the added fact of the colour also makes him appear powerful. Another thing you

 can notice with this shot is the background, as it is a longer, less close up shot there is a background and i really like the use of colours having the white glow around the person almost like a its radiating from him and then the darker greys to blacks towards the edge. The fact the colours are quite dull also makes Muammar stand out more. 

The portrait of Brian Cowen is similar to the portrait of Dalia Grybauskaite, its very close up and he is looking straight into the lense so it looks like he is looking at you in the picture. The only difference between the first 2 portraits and the last one is that the last one has some form of expression whereas the first two don't really have any expression. He has a half, side smirk on his face now that can be interpreted as a good or bad thing because to me it looks smug. But others may disagree with that. 

The thing i find interesting is how these portraits are in color, because the majority of the portraits i have seen are in black and white. I think colour looks best with these shots because they are modern day leaders so it would only be right to show them in colour than in black and white. I like the high quality of these shots. They have great lighting but also they show every bit of detail making these leaders be shown in their true form not edited or manipulated for the public eye.