During the lock down I asked a number of people to start taking pictures of their experiences. My friend Seb, who lives in Barcelona, shot a roll of film for me and mailed it over to process and scan. I am unsure where I want to use these, if at all, for my research project. For this week’s task however, I decided it would be interesting to see how I could appropriate his images. Using a slide copier, I re-photographed his negatives and the processed the film again creating the above diptych image (Fig: 1 & 2).
On the face of it, both of these images appear to be the same, albeit with different exposures. A fairly straightforward copy, however, it can be argued that Seb’s image is once removed from the concrete world as he originally photographed it.
In my appropriated version, I have further removed the reality by copying the image onto a new roll of film, creating a positive image onto the filmstrip. My copied version is also based on decisions that I have made during the copying process. As a result, I have created an object that is mine, in the form of the new negative. I have become quite interested in how a photograph can represent its subject and it can be argued that my version is even less representative than the original. Yet, if seen in isolation, would be considered on similar merit to the original it copies.
Not shown here, but during the copying process, I also made selections and edited the order of the images that Seb took, which further decontextualises them.
I am considering taking this idea into my own images to see how I can create a sense of separation through this kind of implicit abstraction.
