Creative concept, art direction, photography and retouching by Sharon Blance.
Double portrait of award-winning electronic music composers Matt Rankin and Vanessa
Nimmo, commissioned for the cover of their debut album "This Version is No Longer
Supported".
Matt and Vanessa use sounds from retro technology – the whir of a rotary dial
telephone, clacking typewriter keys, dial-up modem bleeps, or the notes of an old Nokia
ringtone – and weave them into surreal soundscapes using sampling and computer
processing.
They wanted the album cover to “feature our faces and be dark and creepy, and if we
could somehow look like robots, that would be cool.”
To develop the concept, I drew inspiration from retro album covers of bands like
Kraftwerk, and science fiction tropes. Colour and lighting effects were captured
simultaneously in-camera using gelled studio lights and a digital projection of actual
musical computer code written by Matt.
Sharon grew up in Canada and has been creating pictures for as long as she can remember. Her first love was painting, until a school project to make a pinhole camera from a shoebox sparked a lifelong fascination with photography.
She currently works in Melbourne as a commercial photographer. Her personal interests lie in art photography, particularly analog or alternative image making methods, and exploring the psychological relationship between picture and viewer.
Awards 2020 2x Honourable Mentions – PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris
2019 Honourable Mention – Tokyo International Foto Awards
2019 Third Place (Film/Analogue), 4x Highly Commended, and Honourable Mention – Australian Photography Awards
2019 3x Honourable Mentions – International Photography Awards
2018 Silver Winner – PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris
2017 6th place (Portrait) – Australian Photography Awards
