Artist Research- Amy Friend
Amy Friend is a Canadian artist who predominantly works with photography. Her work often explores themes related to history, time, land-memory, dust, oceans and our connections to the universe.
This is a photographer who I am using to slightly develop my second final exhibition idea (light trails). A series of hers I have chosen to look at is called ‘Dare alla Luce’, which translates from Italian as ‘Bring to the Light’. In this series, she developed a process of hand-piercing anonymous, old, non-contextual photographs (many featuring unknown people with no links to her) to let light pass through them. This method of using light became central to the project as it symbolised the revival of these forgotten images.
I like the look of Friend’s pictures as to me, it looks like parts of the photos are steadily fading away and splitting into tiny particles or fragments; The details of the images slowly disappearing like a memory being gradually forgotten. This contrasts quite a bit with my photo essay as the old photos I used in that shoot had all the details clearly visible, like a distinct memory rather than a vague one.
Amy Friend Shoot Plan
This experimental shoot is going to utilise light in a different way compared to my first shoot surrounding the use of light so far in this project. My plan is to find family photos (like I did for my photo essay) to scan and print out before using a pen or something similar to pierce the holes in it. I would then take pictures of the photo, while using a torch as artificial backlighting, so the holes look like small glowing particles, comparable to Amy Friend’s work. To make sure the light only travels through the holes, I am going to reinforce the printed photos with black paper or card behind them (before piercing the holes).
Amy Friend Shoot
For this shoot, I selected a photo of my own great grandparents along with some old photos of myself and my parents. I scanned them to re-print out before gluing them onto a piece of black card. Using 3 needles of different thicknesses, I pierced holes in the photos. I arranged them so that the holes would have different effects, creating unique designs for each photo.
When shooting, I placed my camera on a tripod to take both portrait and landscape images. I used two artificial light sources in a dark room. I had a warm coloured ring light placed around the camera lens to illuminate the front of the photo, along with a bright white light positioned behind it. I also used the two second timer feature on the camera so I was able to hold the photo to fill the whole frame. I made sure the ISO was high and the aperture was large as I needed to use a very fast shutter speed of 1/400 sec to get clear photos, due to my hands shaking.
I am really proud of the way these photos turned out when I took them so they do not need any editing. This is an artistic technique that I think could work really well to accompany my third idea for my final piece (tunnel art). I could still make the tunnel art but pierce holes in it to then mount the whole thing onto an outward facing window. This would let sunlight shine through some areas of the image, creating a similar effect to what I have achieved here.