My Work: Experimenting with Photography & Collage
POSTED ON Sunday, 31 March 2013 AT 09:05 \\
After visiting the London West End Galleries, I was inspired by the amount of collage being exhibited. The work that I was particularly drawn to was that of C.K Rajan in The Photographer's Gallery. As I said in the previous post, C.K Rajan overlays just two contrasting images sourced from magazines or newspapers with the intention to show how economic modernisation creates strange social and cultural contradictions. I decided to follow this concept by using a mixture of old family photos and my own images to create a collage. However instead of creating collages by hand, I decied to scan old photos and create my works on Photoshop.

Past & Present

Process

  • Open all the images I want to collage: an old photo of my grandparents who passed away last year, a war photo of a ship taken by my grandpa and my own photograph of their doorstep in Stanmore, where they lived for most of their lives.
  • Using the magnetic lasso tool i cut around the picture of my grandparents.
  • Here I layered the house and ship images together using the blending tool 'lighten'.
  • I wanted the house number to still be visible.
  • I like how the colouring of the old photo has been able to age my digital photograph.
  •  Here I dragged the photo of my grandparents onto the background, resizing them to the appropriate size.
  • Final adjustments to colours and contrast were also made here.

Last year I lost both of my grandparents and since then their house in Stanmore has been cleared out and recently sold. I went back to photograph the house one last time, inside out. It was a place that held so many memories and had barely changed throughout the years, only becoming more cluttered with family photos and less well maintained. The photo of my grandma and grandpa here is only a tiny image and I am yet to find a photograph of the two of them outside their house through the thousands of photographs I am in the process of sorting for a project where I hope to explore my family's history and come up with a way of presenting my findings. I photoshopped the couple on their doorstep (a photo I took on my more recent visit last month) and decided to layer on an old photograph of a ship my grandpa would have taken during the war. I felt that this added a different dimension to the photograph, maintaining that sense of the past and things long gone, but a significant moment for everyone, and a prominent time of my grandparents lives that they were a part of and an experience they shared and endured together. I hope to create more of these style collages using the old photographs that were taken by my grandparents as a way of telling a story through one image rather than an entire album full.

The Sound of Summer

Process

  • Similar process to previous, opening two images: one of my half sister when she was younger, playing the recorder in my grandparents house and a photograph of the garden chairs in my grandparents garden on a summer day.
  • I cut out the outline of my Rebecca's form and placed it onto the scene and resized as appropriate.
  • For a warmer and more aged effect, I adjusted colours here. I often edit my images by enhancing the reds and pinks.

Other Attempts at Collage


 Humour



My dad and my uncle with a stuffed bear with a flower crown.


This was a photo taken on one of my grandparents holidays. I'm not exactly sure where it was taken, but the large building in the background reminded me of an Indian structure and brought me to the story of Aladdin. I took an image of my half sister and myself as a baby sat on our 'magic carpet' (a towel to keep us from getting grass stains on our clothes, no doubt). I applied a premade texture (here) over the top too, to enhance the dreamlike quality and illusion of clouds.

Representation of Generations



My half sister and myself as a baby, out on the garden lawn. In the foreground I placed an image of my grandma (middle) and her two friends, sat on the grass on sports day.


Here I layered a photograph of my three uncles (on my mother's side) as children onto a backdrop of a cornish beach scene that I found when rummaging through albums. I chose this backdrop because the bright, saturated colours really caught my eye.

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