Canvas to the Imagination

Amari is the lovely lady featured in a new series of photos I shot last week, of which the above photo is a part. She teaches classes at the yoga studio I frequent here in Vancouver. We began the session shooting portraits and various yoga poses, but due to limitations with the shooting space I wasn’t happy with how things were going. I decided to suggest an idea I’ve had on my mind for ages - placing the model behind a backlit piece of fabric - and off we went in a better direction with the shoot. I’m very happy with the results and have a few other ideas I’d like to try in a similar way.

Today I am spending some time reviewing my work, trying to figure out what I should do with cradle frames I bought to do heat transfers upon. It’s a good opportunity to create new work, but at the same time I’m torn because I’d like to use some older stuff that hasn’t been shown before.

I found the above image as I was going through my digital collage work, and decided to post it here. I think it may be the strangest self-portrait I’ve done because it is so abstract. I have a love/hate feeling about it because, though I like bits and pieces of the image, I’m not entirely convinced it works well as a whole.

Christopher and I made a second attempt at double-exposing film with our holgas. It was Chris’ idea to take a different approach than our first attempt, which involved shooting each frame in the same moment. This time he shot the film first in his holga, rerolled it back to the beginning, then gave it to me to shoot in my own camera. I didn’t know what sort of imagery was already on the film when I took my pictures, but I was instructed to take portraits.

I like the mix of plant imagery overlapping the portraits and the way they create variations in lighting and colour that slightly obscure the subjects features. It reminds me of what I do mixing textures with human figures in my photoshop work. I’m happy with the results of this second attempt, and it’s interesting to compare these to our first roll of film based upon the different approach we took. Hopefully we can explore this idea further in future.