INSIDE STORY: When women get hold of cameras

INSIDE STORY Photographer JULIE CORCORAN creates images with a real DIY-spirit and a budget of just a tenner. Here she tells DAMIAN MCCARNEY about how  compassionate Rotwillers inspired her work, burying her daughter in a bog and how to fake a crucifixion...

 

Think Cavan photography and images of drumlin landscapes, lakes, and ancient ruins come to mind. Shercock’s Julie Corcoran is bringing a fresh perspective to the art form. Typically her beautiful, dramatic compositions have female subjects occupying some disturbed realm, poisoned by a deathly gothic atmosphere.
This form of image making is called composite where she melds various aspects of photographs together to create something completely new that couldn’t have been achieved simply by taking a single shot. Julie was inspired to embark on this technique when watching a music show on telly:
“There was a rapper and he had this Givenchy top on him and it was a snarling Rottweiler,” recalls Julie.
“Now I have rescue Rottweilers, so I get really annoyed when people portray them as vicious. It’s horrible. So I got really really annoyed and I went and took a picture of one of the dogs with a little straw in his mouth – he sat for a sausage. Then I took a picture of a rose, and then I put the two together. So my first composite was a picture of a Rottweiler with a rose in his mouth, to show love and compassion instead of snarly teeth.
“That was my first experience of being motivated enough to want to create something visually – picturing how it would be and then figuring out how I get to that point.”
From browsing through Instagram and elsewhere she seeks inspiration from other photographers. Of her favourites, Brooke Shaden an American based photographer with hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram comes top.
From that beginning she has proceeded to create a curious array of melodramatic images. It comes as no surprise when, in the course of the interview over a cuppa in the Bailie Hotel, she explains that Kate Bush fans liked a particular image. The photos - such as a bare-footed girl in scarlet dress in a field and holding a broken mirror that doesn’t reflect, but instead allows the viewer to see through the girl’s torso - chime with singer Bush’s heightened reality.

The images are created using a computer editing suite such as Photoshop. Sounds a bit souless doesn’t it? If she simply bought stock images it would essentially be a 21st century take on montage. However Julie’s artistic process involves much more investment of herself in the work. There’s a whole lotta soul.
One image, which had initially been intended as an album cover with the title ‘Release’ has a girl in profile with her back arched as if possessed, and butterflies emanating from her chest. In discussing it, Julie gives an insight into her process.
“That’s my daughter Aíne, she’s usually my model, I have her well trained in now at this stage,” she says with a laugh. Her other daughter Alanna also features prominently in the work, with only her son Art and husband Patrick Cusack escaping to gaze of her lens. 
All of the elements of the final image are photographed by Julie before she commences work on the studio.
“My challenge is like a treasure hunt. Right, I want to convey this, this, this – now I have to go find them.
“The butterflies are actually real butterflies in a frame that I photographed, and are individually put in there. Then there’s textures put on top to give it a painterly look – so I photographed concrete or horse hair or whatever.”
Another composition in her impressive portfolio features a girl standing waist deep alongside a horse in a lake.
“That horse was in the lake,” she laughingly explains, adding that a friend of her daughter owned the pony. “That is the secret to Photoshop – people say how do you make it so real? Actually stick them in the lake! It looks much more real, and then you just throw a texture on top.”
Another has her daughter sitting cross-legged, holding a candle and submerged beneath a tree.
“The challenge was to stick her underground. Now there’s loads of people who’ll make up stuff in Photoshop and Illustrate or whatever,” she begins.
A slightly worried Celt pre-empts: “but you buried your daughter?”
“I went to a bog outside Virginia - and you know the way they cut away a part of a bog - I thought, that’s perfect! If I photograph that it looks like soil, and then just throw her in there. And then there’s the petrified wood, it almost looks like a claw or a hand, and the sky.
“She was photographed at home on a sheet and then just put the two together, bring in the warm light and put a bit of texture on top.”
As we leaf through her portfolio, the drama jumps off the page.
“There’s punch,” she agrees. “I do like to pare everything back to the punch, and keep them simple.”
Accessibility is a key factor in Julie’s work:
“There’s people who travel the world to get their photographs, or spend big money on props and stuff – that’s my daughter modelling, and that’s a charity shop dress. All the dresses in my photos are from a charity shop, so the budget would be about five or ten quid.
“A lot of the dresses I use look timeless – they are like polyester bridesmaid dresses from the ‘70s. I love them,” she says delightedly. 
In the majority of the images, the subject’s face is obscured by their long hair draped before them.
“When you’re in club photography and you put in a portrait, the old rule is you have to have eye engagement. So I learned the rules of composition and then said, well I’m not going to follow them now. I’m not going to have her making eye contact with you at all, so you’ll have to bring your own thoughts to it.”
It’s only after she has captured all of the elements first hand that the work on editing commences.
“I get lost in it,” she says noting she could spend up to twelve hours on editing. “I love to be able to save it and give it a rest for a week or two and come back to it and see does anything stick out.”
How do you know a composition is finished?
“That’s the big question,” she says.
“I go around a lot of clubs and that’s one of the top three questions I get asked: when you’re doing something like this and you have no guidelines.”
Julie’s decision making is made easier by having a routine.  
“You sort out the background first, what your subject is doing and then maybe a prop – so you have key steps that you automatically do.
“Then you get to a point where you’re digitally cutting them out and putting them together. When it looks right, then you start working on the colours, then you start putting in the textures, and lighting.”
Julie’s composite works have seen her awarded medals by what are known as ‘photographic salons’, essentially competitions held throughout the world. She has recently been approached to exhibit her work in the Iontas Theatre, Castleblayney - it will be held later this spring.
The composites haves also been the basis of her attaining the second of the three levels of distinctions awarded by the Irish Photgraphic Federation. Having obtained her ‘Licentiateship’ in 2015, Julie’s ‘Associateship’ (A) distinction was awarded two years later. She’s has only a Fellowship left to go.
“I’m taking my time with that one,” she says.
When she presented her ‘A’ panel of 15 works to the Irish Photographic Federation assessors in the ‘Visual’ contemporary arts space in Carlow in 2017, the judges were reluctant to let the work go.
“They asked could the Visual hold onto my panel for a month afterwards – so they stuck it up in the Visual in Carlow. That was really nice.”
Amongst that collection was the eye-catching image of her daughter on a cross, which was an affect achieved by slipping a broom handle through the arms of the dress and replacing them with photos of an enlarged book spine to create the crucifix.
“When I was down in Carlow, someone said to me: ‘Jesus, you’re the first person to crucify their daughter to get an A’. So this one always gets a bit of attention.”
While her composites have been known to surprise viewers, Julie loves to surprise herself. She suspects that she is learning about herself in delving into this imaginative work.
“This is the thing – obviously it’s coming from my subconcsious – the colours I choose, the way I pose her, the end result that I have in my mind – it’s in my subconscious, so when I do a picture I’m even surprised, or I’m looking at it: ‘Where the feck did that come from?’ If I put it out there they’re going to think I’m ‘this’, ‘that’ or ‘the other’. That’s why I always throw in a nice uplifting one every so often – ‘Lads, it’s alright.’
“When my ‘A’ panel went up, there was a friend of mine who’s a retired doctor in Kilkenny – and he’s like: I think you need to see a psychotherapist.”
Would Julie call yourself a photographer?
“Yeh,” she immediately responds, although she is still digesting the question.
Still?
“Artist,” she replies, but doesn’t like the after-taste. “Oh God, can I say conceptual photographer? Because I can’t draw – I can only draw stickmen, so I’m not going to be a conceptual artist in that sense, but I’d say a conceptual photographer, I think it’s safe to say that: I won’t get too many anorak men with their camera gear upset by saying that. ‘Cause they might get a little bit upset – but no, it’s the future, they need to embrace it. Or maybe it’s just what women do when they get a hold of a camera.”