Photography: Benedict Morgan's crisp staged photographs will blow your mind

Date
23 August 2013

Benedict Morgan has got his style down. His photographs tend to have an almost graphic quality to them; pure, uncluttered product shots structured by an arrangement of building blocks on a simply lit background and punctuated by strong, unrelenting colours. His clean, sharp finish will have you longing for a time when carefully staged images were preferable to portraits of scruffy girls and roads leading into the distance.

Most impressive, however, is his Painted Stripes series, in which a gradient of subtle grey stripes which appear to have been added to his photographs in post production have in fact been arduously painted on to the set, and the photographs shot entirely in-camera.

Can’t quite get your head around that? The photograph exposing the setting in which the images are taken should do the job for you.

Ben explains: “The idea came from the process you do in the dark room when exposing different sections of the test strip to get the correct exposure. You end up with a striped image, each stripe darker than the next. So in these works instead of each line being exposed differently, they have been painted with different tones of grey. To achieve the test strip effect, the lines needed to be perfectly straight, so they were painted in perspective over the set giving the illusion that they are different levels of exposure.”

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Benedict Morgan: Painted Stripes (Set design Caterina Gobbi)

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Benedict Morgan: Painted Stripes, the set

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Benedict Morgan: Painted Stripes (Set design Caterina Gobbi)

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Benedict Morgan: Block Series

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Benedict Morgan: Block Series

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Benedict Morgan: Nike

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Benedict Morgan: Wrapping Paper Series (Set design Caterina Gobbi)

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Benedict Morgan: Wrapping Paper Series (Set design Caterina Gobbi)

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About the Author

Maisie Skidmore

Maisie joined It’s Nice That fresh out of university in the summer of 2013 as an intern before joining full time as an Assistant Editor. Maisie left It’s Nice That in July 2015.

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