Photo Manipulation

 

I chose to combine a picture of a pool at Trinity with a picture of someone walking on the beach.  I basically just wanted to make something unusual that would look interesting, so having someone walking on water seemed like an appropriate thing to create.  To make it, I used three layers: the background with the water, the normal unretouched person walking taken from Stock Exchange, and a duplicate image of that person set at an angle to create a reflection.  I mainly focused on manipulating the reflection.  I first dialed down the opacity to give it a blended quality with the water, and then used Liquefy to distort it into something like a reflection.  I then blurred the image to soften the edges a bit.  The last thing I used was the eraser tool to help both overlaid images blend with the background.  It doesn't look that realistic, but in creating it I noticed that it looks kind of like a melted trail that the walker leaves behind, which I thought was cool in its own way.  I wouldn't say that this is harmful because it was done just to create something unreal and absurd, and things that are that far from reality usually aren't too harmful.  Plus, my skills are such that even if I wanted to harm anyone by trying to fool them it probably wouldn't work too well.  I just see it as some absurd, (obviously) fabricated picture of some person walking on water created because I thought it would look nice (or at least strange).

What's interesting is that a picture like this is a much more lowbrow version of the same basic spirit in an art movement: Futurism.  My article looked at the "photodynamism" of Futurist photography in Italy in the early 20th century.  The futurists used photographic manipulation ("dynamism") to "suggest a reality that was different from the one represented" (361).  The earliest form of dynamism started with multiple exposures of motion (hence the name), but this technique was extended into portraiture (361).  Here is an example from the article:

Multiple exposures are used to create the illusion of the subject merging with a cat, which recorded not "a kinetic event, but a varied and differentiated recapturing of a subject almost as if it were possible to render the faceting of the Ego" and therefore gives "a total suggestion of all aspects of the subject represented, variously assumed allegorical, narrative, psychological, or characterological dimensions" (361).  It is obviously a constructed photograph, but it is one not done not out of a wish to fool someone.  Rather it uses its obvious "fakery" to comment on a subject and the surrounding connotations created by such a juxtaposition.

So, in this sort of tradition, I'm definitely not trying to fool anyone.  I guess I could now ask: what are the connotations of a person walking/melting on water in a pool at Trinity?  I have no idea.

Works Cited:

Lista, Giovanni. "Futurist Photography." Art Journal 41.4 (1981): 358-364. Print.