Nadav Bagim

Nadav Bagim is another photographer who is otherwise preoccupied in other professions. Bagim is a brain sciences student from Israel who, like Keochkerian, only recently got into photography and is using it as a hobby and a way of making money on the side. Bagim’s subjects are all nature based from animals to landscapes, but what attracted me to his work was his macro shots of insects. (Bagim, N.2014).

Bagim has one project that was of particular interest to me, his WonderLand project. He has this to say about his work ‘The WonderLand series was composed using a unique but rather simple and elegant artificial lighting and household objects (from vegetables to plastic bags). The photos were shot in a miniature studio on the kitchen table wit a Canon EOS 60D, a Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens and flashes. The photos are real, not a digital manipulation, and the outcome is a beautiful magical set with a fairy flair to it. The small models were found in my apartment and on plants outside my window, all alive and active, none of the was harmed during shooting.’ (Bagim, n. 2014)

The WpmderLand project can be seen my following this link. (http://www.aimishboy.com/wonderland.html)

Bagim’s sets look like surreal alien worlds; this is what attracted me his work. The colours and subject combine to make something that is quite unique and very unworldly. The colours alone create a surreal atmosphere, but then combined with the insects make the whole thing very alien. As there is no sense of scale with in the images its easy to imagine and get lost in the world created within the photographs.

Again, just like Keochkerian’s work, it gets me thinking about using colours within my own work to create the surreal atmosphere. They work really well to create something very alien because it’s something we don’t expect, it’s something different.

Also the sense of scale is a big contributor to the surreal effect, start changing perspective and scale of things that are known to people, but present them in different ways and the subject should stand out. Bagim’s subjects work really well because they are details of the everyday that people miss, photographed in a way which directs attention to them so the audience sees them in a new light so to speak.

Nadav Bagim

Nadav Bagim

Nadav Bagim

Nadav Bagim

Nadav Bagim

The two above images are good examples of photographing something similar but presenting it in a way that is different to the norm, giving the viewer a distorted sense of what they are seeing, creating the surreal atmosphere.

The water and ‘grass’ elements being similar, and the general shape of the insects, but combined with the colours and the scale (macro making them look large and seeing details otherwise missed) makes the whole image look like your peering into some unknown alien world.