Film: Photograms

"The Devil doesn't like the cold"

ARTIST STATEMENT

I didn't attach the original photogram but I feel as though you can assume what it was. These were fun to make, they really were. From the start it seemed like a lot of work, but I quickly began to enjoy it. First I needed to collaborate 3 or 4 pictures I'd previously taken into one image. I wanted to make it look good and as close to reality as I could rather than just some random collage. I did that by finding a good background image of the water and putting the subject on top of it to seem as though they were standing on it. I replaced his goggles with the light from my monochromatic project and used the shadow of "Home" as the sky. Our next task was to transform the image in some way so I decided to block light to make other images appear. My first attempt was to make a halo above the subject head, but after finding difficulties with that, I decided to show his true nature and add devil horns and a tail. I liked this approach better because it adds a realistic and more humorous look to the image.

In the second image I wanted to cover more of the photogram, but still wanted to involve my main subject. By printing out paper copies and doodling on them, I came up with the idea to draw stick figures and make them look like they were climbing on him. On the left you can see one in the different stages of parachuting of his hand and on the right they are rappelling off his helmet. I got to get really creative with this, especially with the fighter jet shooting at the alien spaceship.I wanted to lastly add the boat just to balance out the image more on the right. When this thought first came to my head I was going to try to cut all of these figures out of paper, but I was then told that using a sharpie to draw on another piece of transparency paper and lay it over the negative would be a lot faster and easier.

I'm very happy with how both of these images turned out and I think they are very strong how they are now.