Editing and manipulating negatives is something that I would love to play around with and explore again as I love the eerie vintage effect that the photos give once manipulated. I had an idea in mind for the two photos below, I wanted them to deface them, to appear as if the two boys in the photo had died or been killed and I had found the photo that the murderer had defaced. It is quite a dark idea, but I wanted my photos to look quite creepy and make the viewer feel slightly uncomfortable.
H O W I M A D E M Y I M A G E S
My first photo - To create this image I took my negative and completely scratched out the two faces, in a rather angry and messy fashion. I used scissors and held them at an angle to expose the sharp blade to the negative. I decided not to use any ink or cut shapes out of it as I did not want to over embellish it by using loads of different elements as I believed that this would ruin the look that I was aiming to achieve. I also wanted to keep it rather simple so I just decided to scratch and deface the image. Using other elements and embellishing it in a detailed and careful fashion was not what I was going for either, as I did not want my photo to look pretty. I was actually very pleased with the outcome and really loved how the scratches were so deep and held resembelence to plant or grass like textures.
My second photo - This image turned out to be rather interesting, it ended up looking like a mixture of a chemigram and a photogram. This was not intentional but I ended up liking the final image. After developing my photogram, I forgot to rinse it completely and the chemicals stayed on there, causing the photogram to develop further and change colour and resemble a chemigram. Parts of the image turned lilac creating an interesting contrast with the black and white tones running throughout my image.
H E L E N P E A R T & M A R Y S T A R K
Helen Peart and Mary Stark are two artists who did a collaborative project in which they explored the materiality of photography by manipulating a series of negatives and seeing how different chemicals and actions have an effect on the original image. It appears almost as if a completely different secondary image is created as they look so different and they convey completely different, eerie dark feelings. The first two images are made up of two negatives creating an effect called double exposure. A faint, light, ghostly effect is created, it looks quite translucent/empty looking. The third image was created by burning hole on the middle of a negative, causing it to melt and create bubble like textures and a hard, melted texture when dried. I think that the fourth image was created by putting a mesh or wire grid into the enlarger with the negative, so that when it is projected onto photographic paper it has a grid like effect and creates shapes.
I took inspiration from these two artists whilst manipulating my negatives as I really liked how they used materials and elements to create this effects onto the plastic film. They also carried out a very similar experiment to the one I had carried out by just seeing how different looks can be created purely through experimentation.