Back in 2009, Patrick Strattner had a dilemma: he needed to beef up his photography portfolio but he wasn’t quite sure how to do it. He wanted to add a solid still-life series, but he couldn’t figure out what his subject should be. Inspiration, as it occasionally does, came at 35,000 feet. “I was on an overseas flight and flipping through SkyMall magazine, which I’ve always loved, and thought it would be great to come up with some ‘inventions’ that poked a little fun at these types of unnecessary gadgets that you see,” he says. In other words, to advance his career as a photographer, Strattner had to try his hand as a product designer.
A SkyMall product is only as good as the problem it solves–or, more specifically, the convoluted way it goes about solving it. So Strattner had to think hard about simple things to fix in comically complex ways. “When I first tried to think of products to invent, I just looked at my everyday life,” he says. “I felt like brushing my teeth took way too long and was way too much of a complicated process; I had to go grocery shopping, but didn’t have a car and lived on the fifth floor without an elevator. A friend told me how she had to shave her boyfriend’s back and how gross it was and, well, I guess you get the idea.”
His still life series, Prototypes, includes self-made gizmos that address all these issues and more. The teeth-cleaning ritual was streamlined by the “Automatic Upper and Lower Full Mouth Toothbrush,” a handheld bristle-and-gear monstrosity that looks like something out of the Saw movies. Those hirsute backsides? Tamed with the “Battery Operated Back Hair 2-in-1 Shaving and Grooming System,” a jetpack-style over-the-shoulder assemblage outfitted with a full-width array of electric shavers between two rows of combs.
Since the aim was always to have something to photograph, Strattner couldn’t just dream up his wild gizmos–he had to build them, too. “I did a lot of online research to find just the right parts,” he explains. “In a way it was like a puzzle without a picture.” Home improvement stores and flea markets were essential for components; the frame of the back hair-shaver, for example, is actually a series of shower curtain rods spray-painted by the artist.
The resulting photographs turned out just like Strattner had imagined: perfectly polished hero shots of truly absurd contraptions. But along the way, it seems, Strattner might have caught the inventor’s bug. “I’m in the lucky position that I don’t need the back hair shaver, but I would really love to use a full mouth toothbrush,” he says. “I already have some ideas for improvements like adding dental floss and an automatic toothpaste dispenser…”
Original article and pictures take www.wired.com site
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