Tim Diggles as… 6

This month I have recreated a photograph by Annie Leibovitz of Andy Warhol from 1976. It was a much more complex image than I at first expected, especially with the limited lighting/flash I own, but with a combination of lights and Photoshop, I eventually got an image. I had to make the Minox camera from a couple of old boxes and the tape recorder from another box. As with all these it is created in my smallish front room with limited resources.

In many ways the sort of work I am doing on here would not have happened without Warhol. I would argue that he was one of the first artists to truly break away from the romantic and formal traditions of art, which someone like Picasso was at the summit. A great deal of what he did was about idea rather than painterly or sculptural qualities. Warhol took contemporary images and others’ creations as subject and concepts outside the prevailing themes of abstraction, surrealism and so forth; he created an accessible art form which have many layered qualities far more complex than the surface image.

Annie Leibovitz has been a leading photographer of the people in period she has lived through and a wonderful fashion photographer. Well worth looking into further if you don’t know her work.

Go here to see the previous Tim Diggles as… images.

This image should have been completed in June, but a visit to hospital put it back, and as I have another operation coming up this and other projects may be put on hold for a while.