This week I explored digital post-processing photography in various creative ways, using existing images to create digital collages.

The first image is a post-processed portrait using triangle-shaped cuts to break the model’s body into shards that could slide along each other. This image is inspired by Movements 6, a photograph from the sequence of images created by Ban Sanders for Blast Magazine in their Autumn 2013 issue. Saunders used creative post-processing techniques to deliver the series, which explored the nature of human movement.

Movements 6 by Ben Sandler for Blast Magazine Autumn 2023.

This image utilised a studio photograph created in the first year of my undergraduate degree. I edited it in Photoshop to give it new life. The triangles' shard-like appearance suggests a broken mirror. With the model looking directly at the viewer she appears to be contemplating her appearance. I aligned the eyes to create an illusion of a glance, drawing in the viewer. I intended the eyes to be the primary focal point before the viewer’s gaze moved to the remainder of the image. This seems to work well, making the effect rather unsettling.

Encouraged by this image I continued to experiment with other Photoshop features, creating several other images around the theme of a triangle.

I transformed the perspective of this image to enhance its naturally triangular shape. Again, the viewer’s eye is directed to the model’s gaze. With her head at the apex of the triangle, her arms create leading lines guiding the eye. The triangle shape created echoes the female-assigned gendered triangle.

This image used a series of stepped triangular masks to create a gradient effect that finishes at the model's head. The wider image has been transformed using a crystalline pixel filter, which I chose because of the angular shape of the pixels, which despite not being triangular, echo the overall theme.

Digital Mixed Media

The following images are a progression from last week's zine-making project, where I explored gender expression within printed media. I again utilised images I created in the first year of my undergraduate degree. For this work, I selected several photographs created using black and white (Ilford) 35mm film, which I scanned to digitally manipulate.

The original work was created in Southampton High Street during the run-up to Christmas when a great many people were busily shopping. After surveying the individuals in each of the photographs, I applied a blue or pink triangle over each of them, to correspond with my impression of their sex. In using the triangle as a stamp of gender recognition I intended to bring attention to the subconscious processes that we use to assess the sex of strangers.