I already mentioned in my last post, that when I first saw my pictures in black and white, I was kind of disappoint because, I guess, I just kind of expected it to look different, more artsy or professional maybe, I don't really no what the problem was, but after all, I started to think about how I could edit the pictures differently so that they would become more 'special' and 'extraordinary'.
As I mention in every post about my project, Pickersgill and Geiger have been huge inspirations for the development of my journey, but after all I felt that I was still looking for something different, something more...
So I just started searching through Google, not really knowing what I was actually looking for, but what I found gave me loads of new ideas how I could further develop my project.
This new inspiration of mine, is a series of pictures called 'Hide and Seek' by photographer Kamil Kotarba, and similarly to the 2 other photographers I examined, he also tries to picture the lack of human interaction and the social and personal alienation created by the excessive use of smartphones.
In Pickergill's project, we've seen the artist removing just the phones from the pictures, Kotarba does exactly the opposite, he erases everything, the whole body, the face, the entire person, and just leaves the viewer with arms and smartphones.
Maybe the most direct and powerful message, comparing the three different series.
Additionally, Kotarba's play with the colour's is very interesting, contrary to REMOVED, his pictures are not in black and white, but nevertheless one has the feeling that the colours are fading and although there is colour, it seems as everything has a grey tone, which creates a very oppressive and sad atmosphere, and definitely helps bringing the message across, because although the colours are there, they do not distract from the actual purpose of the images.
So this project really has been another huge inspiration for me.
As I thought about how I could change my project, the idea of also trying to erase the bodies definitely came to my mind once I had seen Hide and Seek, but I thought that after all the time and effor I put into finding different people and bringing them into the right position, etc... I felt that something would've been missed and it wouldn't have been my project anymore.
So I had a few other ideas, inspired by Kotarba's project.
I thought about maybe instead of erasing the whole body I could just play around with different levels of opacity, meanings that the bodies and heads would've been transparent but only to the point that they would've still been visible somehow.
But, first of all I didn't really manage to just change the opacity of one part of the picture, although I've played around with photoshop for hours, and second, I thought that maybe working with transparency like that in a black and white image would let the people same like ghosts and hence disconcert the viewers.
So I had another idea, which was to just erase the faces in the pictures and thus show that although we're physically there, mentally we're not because we're in our own little online world when hanging on our phones.
So I started trying it out on Photoshop, which turned out to be more difficult than I initially thought.
The thing is that when using the eraser tool, you can not just erase the face, but the entire background will disappear as well. So I tried it with the healing brush tool, which turned out to work, BUT only in very very very few cases and even then, the whole area where the face was supposed to be or disappear got very blurred, so that it didn't really look to good, but see for yourself:
Moreover, as I was already working on Photoshop, I thought it might also be a good idea to try and imitate the 'face-sucking' effect that Geiger used in his series.
This turned out to be rather successful although I didn't manage to do it exactly like Geiger did, because one can see that the face doesn't flow 100% into the phone, but there is like a tiny stop just in front of the phone. BUT I'm trying to figure out how to improve this.
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