Aura photography
Aug. 12th, 2008 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackAura photography is a subtle art. I spent a few days snapping her over and over. Sitting primly on her couch. Plucking a daisy from her small lawn. Taking tea with a Rotarian Imam. Playing bridge with thirty other late middle aged ladies. Surreptitiously playing Lego Starwars in a doctor's waiting room. Catching a tram in a light drizzle, stubbornly using an eagle-head black starry umbrella as an impromptu walking stick, with a little self-satisfied grin.
After a couple of days I'd passed on from interesting photos to abstract ones, delving for the revealing images. I had half-a-dozen from that moment just outside the tram, but only one was nice. I took that and played with it. Half an hour later, I had a hundred variations, the colours jagged and swimming, her face blurring out of recognition, all but that smile, against a backdrop of tram wall, yellow with a nuanced dark stripe, already looking like it was racing past her.
I didn't always, but I took her into my studio to see what she thought. I'd printed out anything I found interesting, sloshing metaphorical barrels of glossy printer ink about, and been arranging them round the room. The first wall showed everything interesting, and so far I'd moved just three into a row on the second wall, the aura wall.
The photos on the first wall were nice, her simple life had an expressive face, and I knew she'd enjoy having some of those photos around, to show other people how she felt. I'd abandoned black-and-white and sepia, and most effects, as they just made her seem more old, more artificial, and most photos just showed her, in her neat skirt and jumper, bursting with colour and smiles, that no-one ever saw in person.
But any good photographer could do that, many much better than me. I enjoyed it almost more, working with a real person, but my true work was on the next wall, trying to photograph not her, but her gneissis, the wake of the world around her.
The first photograph was from her garden, just before she walked to the tram stop, but I'd taken it and made a complete fabrication, taken her face from several of the photographs, adjusted the expression, mapped it onto a rendered head, merged it with another photo, dropped them back into an empty part of the garden, and retinted all the lights and shadows to make it look gothic rather than fake. It showed her passionately kissing a thirty-year-old man in a royal blue T-shirt, and she laughed when I saw it, and I felt sure it reflected something I'd seen, but I had no idea what.
The next was a composition of photos from the tram stop, animated, which showed her stationary, occasionally flickering from one static position to another, but when I'd gone to town and crafted the rain back into a realistic fall, sputtering and splashing around the stationary image.
The last was the blurred close-up, a suggestion of her head, with her exquisite smile, and the black-blue-black and yellow background racing past, like a giant something streaming round her and rearing up. This was by far my biggest clue so far, and I was going to spend the next few days seeking the same theme from other photos.
After a couple of days I'd passed on from interesting photos to abstract ones, delving for the revealing images. I had half-a-dozen from that moment just outside the tram, but only one was nice. I took that and played with it. Half an hour later, I had a hundred variations, the colours jagged and swimming, her face blurring out of recognition, all but that smile, against a backdrop of tram wall, yellow with a nuanced dark stripe, already looking like it was racing past her.
I didn't always, but I took her into my studio to see what she thought. I'd printed out anything I found interesting, sloshing metaphorical barrels of glossy printer ink about, and been arranging them round the room. The first wall showed everything interesting, and so far I'd moved just three into a row on the second wall, the aura wall.
The photos on the first wall were nice, her simple life had an expressive face, and I knew she'd enjoy having some of those photos around, to show other people how she felt. I'd abandoned black-and-white and sepia, and most effects, as they just made her seem more old, more artificial, and most photos just showed her, in her neat skirt and jumper, bursting with colour and smiles, that no-one ever saw in person.
But any good photographer could do that, many much better than me. I enjoyed it almost more, working with a real person, but my true work was on the next wall, trying to photograph not her, but her gneissis, the wake of the world around her.
The first photograph was from her garden, just before she walked to the tram stop, but I'd taken it and made a complete fabrication, taken her face from several of the photographs, adjusted the expression, mapped it onto a rendered head, merged it with another photo, dropped them back into an empty part of the garden, and retinted all the lights and shadows to make it look gothic rather than fake. It showed her passionately kissing a thirty-year-old man in a royal blue T-shirt, and she laughed when I saw it, and I felt sure it reflected something I'd seen, but I had no idea what.
The next was a composition of photos from the tram stop, animated, which showed her stationary, occasionally flickering from one static position to another, but when I'd gone to town and crafted the rain back into a realistic fall, sputtering and splashing around the stationary image.
The last was the blurred close-up, a suggestion of her head, with her exquisite smile, and the black-blue-black and yellow background racing past, like a giant something streaming round her and rearing up. This was by far my biggest clue so far, and I was going to spend the next few days seeking the same theme from other photos.