This series of images I have returned to my images taken in Japan. As soon as I came back and processed the photos I knew that I wanted to use them for something. I though that some of these photoshop techniques I had been developing could work really well to enhance some of my photos. I started off quite simple but expanding the canvas of the image so that it was surrounding by blank space and letting photoshop fill the space to created this hyper real scene. For the most part photoshop was leaving a lot of impurities and unlike before, when I felt the anomalies were working within the images, for this set of photographs I wanted to try and create theses even textures and environments.
Experimenting with these new ways of making images, it is proving quite hard to find contextual references to support and evolve my practices at this stage. I feel with these images I can find that connection with photographers such as Gursky who rely so heavily on photographic manipulation. It was interesting to be able to confront a full scale print of Gursky’s Cocoon I at ‘A New Objectivity: The Düsseldorf School of Photography’ exhibition at Sotheby’s S2 Gallery. Getting as close as I could to the piece I noticed that Gursky work had strange digital defects but from a far they were barely noticeable. Could this have been a reference to pointillism or just a defect from working with composite images. Either way it was interesting to see.
I feel that with these images I’m really starting to work well with the techniques. I’ve learnt to take more time with the images trying to line up elements and objects as well as going back into the image with the stamp tool to even out the clear errors of the image. There are still digital errors within the work but they are much more subtle and add to a sense of the mystery as we stare into the image and it reveals it’s imperfections.
