Phogotraphy

One look around Emily Scaife’s website is all it takes to see that this photographer is full of great ideas. Scaife uses photography, film making and illustration in her work and she has an extraordinary skill in turning the seemingly mundane into a visual delight, creating optical illusions by isolating her subject matter through either a macro lens, microscope or scanner and tricking us into thinking we’re looking at something entirely different. My favourite of these series are the ‘Cosmic Crispies‘. Scaife has given them the byline ‘Meteorological breakfast’ and they certainly make a wonderful feast for the eyes:

By photographing them in black and white against a pitch black background she makes them snap, crackle and pop in our brains as little asteroids (we’ve seen this type of imagery coming back from NASA – they’re not cheating and using Rice Crispies too are they?!). They are fascinating to look at and compare, who’d have thought each Crispie would be so different?

Here are some more from the series:

Also along the breakfast theme, ‘Jammin‘ is a scanned series of images that works well as an optical illusion too, I thought they were old Roman coins at first and it would take a while to work out if you didn’t know what they really were:

Did you get the breakfast clue? They’re actually little pots of marmalade Scaife has collected from hotels in the Midlands.

Other projects by Emily Scaife that should not be missed are the lovely ‘Lost Corners’, a series of scans that stir your imagination into wondering what the rest of each image looked like:

And ‘Ken at the Window‘, a very odd collection of dolls seen through the window of Shoreditch Junk, London:

Last but not least is the wonderfully obscure ‘Fish in Skirts‘, a series that lulls you into a quietly amusing sense of fishy fashion and then hits you with a fish in bright red heels!

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Thanks for sharing your work with us Emily Scaife, we look forward to seeing what visual tricks you will play on us next!