Boring Art, Boring Life: Back to the Future Continues to Plague Me                                                  

Back to the Future Continues to Plague Me

    
When last I wrote I had reported some moderate success with the project I am working on called, Back to the Future.  I had created a cake to recreate another project with my brother. I got together with him and recreated the image rather succussfully. The cake was a big part of the success.



In preperation for this project, I needed to recreate the sweater. I had a knitted sweater that sort of matched the original from the photograph. However it needed more stripes. To create these stripes I used a variety of painters tapes to make the new pattern.


 

I know that you can see the bends of the tape easily, however in the final image I will be changing the overal focus and adding grain structure. I suspect that it won't look like tape at all.


The original image was developed in March 1981. There is some contention as to when the photograph was taken. My mother tried to tell me that it was from my brothers third birthday, but I don't think so because there are too many candles on the cake. I suspect it was probably from my Dad's birthday in May 1980. Since we didn't have a lot of money, it is very likely that it took us a year to finish the roll of film and be able to afford the printing.

It took quite some time to set up the sundeck to take this photograph and even more time to get my brother out of bed. He is suffering from a cold and was in no mood to be cooperative. I was able to twist his arm and help me out.



After taking the image and getting it home to the computer I noticed all the errors. Aside from the fact that our bodies are no longer tiny and this forced some of the composition to be off, the positioning of camera is off by about six inches.



I won't be re shooting this though, I ate the cake. This project is proving to be very difficult to get both the posing and the composition correct. It reminds me of an Art 21 video I watched about paradox. Holding the positions of the original image are very difficult and often requires straining, to hold the position for any length of time. Clearly these positions were not painful before, they somehow seemed natural. Obviously there are differences in size, shape and time but this only adds to the concept of paradox within the work. Trying to recreate the past is unnatural, and placing myself into the physical and mental state of the original image is physically and mentally draining.

The final edited image is quite decent. I added lens blur filters, level adjustments, adjustments to brightness and contrast. Plus I added some soft light layers to create the discolouring of the original photographs.



I have another image that still requires editing. It is the one from the same day and place, but a different pose.


Overall these are looking pretty decent.

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