I am now moving further into the identity and will now be looking at the hidden parts of a persons identity.
Lucas Simoes
Lucas Simoes is a Brazilian photographer based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Due to his time as a student at an architecture school, he has experience in various materials and design meaning his background influences his work heavily. Simoes work explores lots of mixed media photography such as burning, cutting, layering and distorting the images. I really like his collection of images that have been melted and burned, Simoes uses a tinted brown photo and then burns the paper creating a distorted and shocking image. The melting paper is disturbing and creates a very vivid horror image as it looks like their faces are being melted away. I like that the expressions on the subjects are unresponsive to the burnt paper as it seems like their unaware of the danger and the fact their identify is being scorched away. In my own work I would also like to burn my photos to achieve an appearance of age. However, unlike Simoes, I would like to achieve more of blacken paper and less melting. Lucas also experiments with creating 3D layered collages. He uses multiply photos to create one distorted image, often completely stripping the person of their identity. Through the complete change of appearance, for me it shows the complexity of a person. Simoes images alter the appearance so much that it takes a while to recognise that the image is of a face, possibly representing how it takes a while to recognise the true type of person someone is. II believe the burnt images could be used to represent lose of memory; once it has burned away, it leaves an empty space, just like forgetting memories. Through the use of usual shapes of the collage the images look futuristic, in my own work I would like to incorporate similar shape montages to achieve a ultramodern appearance.
In my own work I would like to use Simoes as an influence for my own mixed media images I will create for the more personal identity section of my journal.
Burnt Memories and Layered faces
Here i experimented with both layering images as well of burning them, in inspiration of Lucas Simoes
Here is my collection burnt photos, done with the influence of Lucas Simoes. The images are representative of fond memories, an intimate section of someones identity. The burning and melting of the photo represents loosing the memories and forgetting. The identity of the subject is completely miss with most of the face being burned. I chose to print the photos off in black and white to make the warm burnt red and orange colour stand out. In my mixed media book, these images are layer out in a concertina book to imitate a memory album.
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Above are my experiments with layering different physical images on top of each other with geometric shapes cut into them. The images represent the complexity of a persons mind, the confusing images is full of focus grabbing points through the leading lines of the cutting as well as the odd looking face which remains under the layers. My favourite parts of these images is the visible eyes, which grab the viewers attention and creates a connection between image and viewer. If i was to make these images stronger, i would have experimented with vivid colours to show complexity of a mind, as well as cut with more precision for better quality.
Shafts of light
Hidden identity can mean many things. In this section i want to depict the act of revealing, as in the remaining section of my project i will be revealing intimate details of the identity. To capture this sense of 'revealing' i decided to use shafts of light as the technique for this collection. I experimented with different shapes of shadows to reveal more/less of the subjects and lining it up so certain features are highlighted more. I changed the images into black and white so i could get a striking tonal contrast which represents how different a person can be when you strip them down to their hidden identity. This leads into my final section: The deep identity.
