The Golden Age of Grotesque

I have reserched into the manson album artwork that reminded me of the style i was achieving in my last post. Here are examples of the album art:

As we can see it is a similar technique as the subject is blured but not to the point of unrecognisable proportions. I found out the photographer and concept designer for this album was Gottfried Helnwein, an austrain born photographer, artist and performance artist. He has a wide collection of work, most stand out for me is his work entitled Head of a child, where he focuses on the innocence of a child but not in the happy happy way we are used to, instead he focuses on the wounded, the scared and the frightened child. He focuses on the phsycial and emotional scarring. Some of his photos are truely horrific and it is obvious that his focus is on fear and the emotional and psycical embodyment of what it is that is terrifying. after all who else could turn Manson into a horrific mickey mouse? here are a few more of his work on the more fearful and terrorfying side to his work, he seems to have tendencys to hyper realism and has a fasination with nazis (in his most contriversial work) :

  a piece of text from a documentory about His work stated this which i found is a great discription of his work and also shows how it links to mine: 'He confronts us with the dark sides of human nature. Silently but mercilessly he uses the fate of the innocent child to bring before our eyes the human capacity for suffering, making the beholder a passive, and indeed active, accomplice to injury and abuse.' From "HELNWEIN - THE SILENCE OF INNOCENCE"