She is a documentary photographer who has been praised for her work through awards including Top 30 under 30 Magnum Photos 2014 and The Times Eureka Young Photographers Moving Image Award 2012.
Whitton's long term project 'What About The Heart' is a documentary series on the human robotics industry in Japan, which I am hopefully going to use as inspiration for my current project.
She started her project to answer the question "what drives technological progress?", and looked into robotics because its creating some of the most technological advances in the world.
Her work focuses heavily on portraiture and documentary style photographs of the eerily lifelike robot faces which she hopes, forces the viewer to think about what the boundaries are which determine what is a robot and what is human. Her photographs don't include any actual humans captured within, but they feel like they have a very strange human side to them due to the capture of these robot figures. She also includes close up images of the design pages for the robots she's captured, which gives the viewer more depth to the project of invention and progress.
Whitton has also captured wide angle interior photos of the warehouses, which have almost all human aspects removed from them which leaves the images looking very cold and baron with only little elements of human life visible.
I think Luisa Whitton's project What About The Heart is very visually interesting due to the strange dynamic that is visible between the life-like images of robots compared to the cold and baron images of the rooms which they are tested and made in. I hope to take some of these wide angle room interior techniques into my next shoot of the Food Bank, to show the viewer the strange eery dead space which can be seen in these food distribution and waiting rooms in the Food Bank.
