Methods of concept enhancing: Diptychs
After the lesson we had recently with the on-the-spot live brief regarding the use of diptychs, we started to look at ways in which we could try and incorporate this tool into our project to help push the concept further.
Whenever looking at diptychs in the past, I had always just assumed it was a way of presenting two images together as part of a set, and that the line was more or less drawn there. After the lesson, and after also doing some further research in my own time, I discovered there is a lot more to the idea of diptychs than seems first apparant.
The diptych was a common format in Early Netherlandish painting and depicted subjects ranging from portraiture to religious stories. Often a portrait and a Madonna and Child had a leaf each. It was especially popular in the 15th and 16th centuries. Painters such as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling and Hugo van der Goes used the form quite often. Some modern artists have used the term in the title of works consisting of two paintings, never actually connected, but intended to be hung close together as a pair, such as Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych, now a modern pop culture icon.
Through the use of diptychs, it is possible to combine two seemingly varying photographs and tie them together with this format, to create a rhetorical third image within the viewer under their own perceptions through the means of connotative signs.
Seeing as our concept is based around the arts subjects, we thought it would be a good idea to try shooting the models and presenting them in coaltion with suggestive props alongside that convey the arts, such as musical instruments, books, photography/theatre equipment and musical memorabilia.
