Robbie Cooper: Immersion

Robbie Cooper's exhibition 'Immersion' exhibits the disengagement society has from real life to video games and films. These virtual realities allow us to escape ordinary life and to immerse ourselves as our alter-egos, allowing us to become someone or something else.

I've been to the National Media Museum to see this exhibition and found it really interesting to see how Cooper has made this images quite harsh and simple. His style of photography reminds me of our Capture unit and the work we create for that, capturing a scene, scenario or person and to depict a story through the use of photography.

Cooper's use of long periods of filming allows the models to forget that they're being photographed and to allow Cooper to capture their natural moments of unguarded behaviour. I'm not sure if he uses photoshop to edit the images but the sharpness and clarity of them really allow his exhibition to stand out at Media Museum's gallery.

His work relates to our capture work; capturing a person or object in a day of their life. Although Cooper doesn't show us a full day of his subject, his photographs can depict a scenario and a sight into the subjects' lives.
For example, Cooper also photographed gamers and their alter-egos on screen in video games.

We can see here that these gamers create these alter-egos to escape reality and to become more powerful, stronger 'people'. These avatars could stand for a representation of the gamer's hidden personality or true feelings. By creating these personas in this way, the gamer's can be transformed into something that they believe they are not. They can have big muscles and longer hair, they can change their height and eye colour, but it's not real. They are simply immersing themselves into a virtual reality.
And it's really interesting to see how many people change their appearance on screen, to become another person.

But why do they do it?

They may feel under pressure to look a certain way, dress a certain way, or they could create these personalities to feel different; to start a fresh and show their true feelings, as many games now allow gamers to talk while playing on screen.

If i was able, i would create a series of photographs influenced by Cooper's work, to allow the photographs to show a person straight on, but then make the audience look deeper into the person behind the photograph, to find the personality and their story.