Having started to gather photographs for this project, I want to disclose some more detail on the intended use of the images and elaborate on the processing and collating/arranging of them to form the desired look and where that process originated for me.
Rather than producing a volume of single exposure stills and collecting them together to publish in a book in a more traditional manner, my intention is to gather as many photographs from various locations and times, continuing to utilise my driving themes and focuses of bold, harsh, bleak, atmospheric work, often landscape, architectural and at times abstracted in nature. Once I have begun to collect enough of these images, or assets as they are referenced in my cataloguing, I will begin to compile them using Photoshop by stacking varying numbers of images on top of one another and then altering and experimenting with the blend modes of each layer, observing how these combinations of layers, compositions and blend modes creates interesting and abstracted collages that become very textural, dreamlike and with varying themes and atmospheres, I can also experiment with adding selective colours to some layers and observing how the pass through the blend modes on the above layers, enlarging, cropping and manipulating some layers to create textured layers, reduce transparency on some layers to create more ghostly or fogged layers that can shroud the layers underneath to create more suggestive, less obvious compositions. Overall the desired effect is creating images that require more ‘reading’ by where the viewer is invited to observe and question the details of the image, the nature of the composition, its constituent parts, the ecology within the image and how layers sit and work upon one another, possible hierarchies or structures between them, and ultimately what the combination of everything at play is communicating from creator to observer.
The origin of this methodology stems from a previous project that a undertook on my undergraduate course within which I was designing and curating a zine called ‘Praxis’ which focused on left-wing politics, arts & photography, and music & music scenes. Drawing inspiration from the DIY ethos of scenes of punk, hardcore, and grassroots political movements of the 1970s, 80’s and 90’s and intermixing a thematic flavour from more contemporary influences including alternative, fetish, and queer scenes and the styles of zones coming from them. This design style was to feature fairly heavily in the zine, with stylised and textured backgrounds making up the page spreads that would, once assembled, become the very pages of the zine that the content would sit upon.
(Spread designs from Cut The Cord Zine 'Praxis' Volume 1, AMD, 2019,)
The examples of these seen here, are from that project and are kept fairly muted and more texture over detail-oriented as there would have been content placed into the layout and a distracting background would have interrupted the design flow and readability of the zine. But the core process remains the same and by tweaking the emphasis from texture to detail and theme over style, the same effect of creating strong atmospheres and feelings that rely on combinations of sometimes juxtaposing imagery, textured layers and obscure construction to leave things more open to the viewer to take their own readings and impressions from the compositions over a more clear cut image.
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