Response to 'Untitled' By John Stezaker

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After the Tate to Tate trip I was particularly attracted to a series of monochrome pictures from throughout the Modern and Britain. One of these, 'Untitled' By John Stezaker (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/stezaker-untitled-t13593) was minimal in its visual form, yet the physical separation of the flat black print to the left was striking in its reflection of the head opposite it. The composition was particularly pleasing, with the head and line matching up with the rule of thirds - a classic photographical composition. 


Replicating the photo required taking a photo with two light sources - one strong, unfeathered light to the front and a softer back fill to highlight the neck. Once taken, this was brought into Photoshop and edited, as I increased the contrast and manipulated the colours with an overlay to have a similar sepia tone to the original. I then used a mask to paint out the background, and the back of the hair so that the head appeared to disappear into the background. I originally had tried to make the 'stripe' practically as seen in the photo above, but decided the proportion was not going to work with the head. So instead, it was simply a rectangular shape I drew in Photoshop, with a subtle pattern applied and an inner shadow to create the lowlight to the left. The background too was recreated digitally in flat black colour. 

 Leading on from this, I decided that the best way to tell a story from this piece was combining it with some subtle movement. In this way I move it beyond a frozen snapshot of time, as it was in photo form, and into a small narrative. I tried to imagine what might happen after the photo was taken - would the subject would disappear back into the darkness of the environment the photo was taken in?

 This time I needed video footage, not a photo, if the subject was going to move:


 Using Photoshop again (which supports some video editing features too) I masked out the background around the head and spliced it into my digital background with a black fill and the 'stripe'. This took about an hour to do as every frame had to be individually masked out for the effect to work. After this was complete, I horizontally flipped the footage so that it was in the same orientation as the original photo, and rendered it out as a H.264 file to get this:

This piece I had created I felt was an interesting development of Stezaker's original photo as it acted both as a photo and as a small narrative through the limited motion of the piece. This threshold between photography and animation/film is something I am going to explore in greater detail as this body of work progresses.