Tasos Gaitanos (+Pastiches)

As with most of the artists I've looked at in this project, I stumbled upon the Toast Henge photos and traced them back to the photographer Tasos Gaitanos. Instantly, I knew I wanted to create my own version.

To create my own Gaitanos inspired photographs, I had to start off by building my own bread structures. To do this, I used some slightly stale bread and some wooden skewers as supports. Creating these was much harder than I'd originally anticipated. It was difficult to get the bread to stay how I wanted it to be positioned, even with the wooden skewer supports. The bread was prone to twisting and falling, and, if I wasn't careful, the skewer would tear holes. I think this process could've been a little bit easier if I'd left the bread to go a bit more stale.

Shooting was pretty simple. I used some black fabric as a backdrop to ensure the focus was on the sculpture. Unfortunately, I think this backfired a little as it really made the crumbs stand out, and I had to spend a lot of time covering these up in the editing process. That was especially difficult as I had to try to make the fabric still look believable, but I do think I managed to pull it off. Once I'd edited them all to look how I wanted, I organised them in a row, to replicate how Gaitanos presents his Bread Henge pictures on his website.

I am pretty happy with the results of this shoot, but obviously, there are a few things I'd probably change or experiment with if I redid it. The first, and probably most obvious, would be to pick a lighter background for a closer pastiche. Additionally, I'd clean up the crumbs a bit more during the shooting process to try to reduce the amount of editing I'd have to do later on. In a reshoot, I think I'd also experiment a little by using a variety of different breads to see how it changed the piece - rather than sticking to white breads, perhaps incorporating wholemeal or seeded to add a bit of extra contrast.