Julie Cockburn Analysis

Fig. 1 | http://www.re-title.com/
public/artists/5161/1/Julie-Cockburn-4.jpg

Julie Cockburn is an artist who specializes in blending portrait photography and collage artwork to give a twisted perspective to the subject in question. This results in an image with a rather limited/unknown reason to why the subject has been manipulated in such a fashion. However, I feel that Cockburn has done this to leave the viewer to decide for themselves; the meaning, purpose and identity of the scene and subject.

Fig. 2 |http://www.re-title.com/public/artists/
5161/1/Julie-Cockburn-1.jp

Figure one, both subjects have been completely obscured by the subjects; themselves. This was probably achieved by the artist cutting the areas of the image into specific shapes to then. re-arranging the order in a set pattern which would place back together neatly.

Julie may have decided to take this approach to represent how the childhood of someone is soon forgotten/lost as the subject matures with age. Thus obscuring the memories of an individual. 

Alternatively, this could've been done to express a particular quality of the subject at the time of the photograph.For example, lets assume the image was of the 1960/70's, the collage of the subjects face is of a crystal-like formation which could represent the subjects love of diamonds/jewellery. The collages have a similar relationship to the classic kids thing; Spirographs.

However, this doesn't exactly apply to figure 2. Cockburn has taken a slightly different approach to the photograph by re-arranging the face of the subject in a specific, distorted pattern to twist the perspective of the subjects face. 

Thus not only blurring the subject but also distorting who the person behind the picture is, as well as the original message the photographer was trying to put across. This would make sense as such faces would be forgotten (judging by the age of the photograph, I would assume this was taken a very long time ago).