Loretta Lux portraits and how to:

Whilst researching artists who experiment digitally with their photography I was introduced to an artist by the name of Loretta Lux. Loretta who was born and raised in Germany and was originally a painter before becoming a fine art photographer renowned for her surreal portraiture of children.

Study of a Boy 2002

The Drummer

Girl with Marbles 2005

“Photographers can’t help but wonders, when they look at Loretta Lux’s portraits of children, what digital legerdemain she uses to create them. One member of a popular online photography forum has even deconstructed Lux’s presumed Photoshop technique on his own computer, determining it to be a judiciously applied combination of Gaussian Blur, unsharp masking, and use of the Levels control to give the children and their settings a distinctive pallor.” (Russell Hart for American Photo) (Also, see Time Magazine article, Loretta Lux)

You may have guessed that digital editing plays a large roll in Lux’s art-making process. Lux was formally trained as a painter, and her work reminds me a little bit of Brooke Shaden in that way. It feels a little bit like digital printmaking or digital painting or a mixture of the two. Lux doesn't want to reveal her digital process to the public, in order to ‘protect her work’. Yet, viewers and critics appear to be a bit obsessed with figuring out just how she does it, so maybe that is why she will not reveal her process?? 

Lux had admitted that some of her images took over a year to produce from start to finish but thats as detailed as it got.

I, along with many other critics assume that the model (child in this case) is removed and placed onto a background image that had been prepared earlier, whether that be an original landscaped photo manipulated digitally via Photoshop etc to create a flat matt surreal affect or they may even be paintings by herself scanned. The child itself seems to have a large head and eyes, which seem to be out of proportion to the rest of her body. Their extremities all seem to be smaller than their torsos too, there skin pale and de-saturated and there closed blurred up to the edge to create a flat matt texture.