Ever since I stumbled upon this project I have been struggling with what to call it. The orignal artist, Melinda Gibson, made hers by actually cutting up pictures to fill the shapes in other pictures, so collage would be a good name. But we weren't going to be cutting and gluing. We would be using Photoshop. I tried on "Photo Filled Silhouettes" and finally settled "Photo Filled Shapes" when I realized that they could be created from any shape. It still doesn't feel like the right title, but considering we're about to finish the project I think I should probably just let it go.
We could have literally filled any shape with any photo, and it could have led to interesting results, but since this was for my advanced class I wanted to add a bit of challenge while at the same time giving the weirdness of this project some deliberateness. So, I'm requiring some sort of contrast or conflict between the original photo and the photos filling it. For my sample for the project I decided to use a headshot I had taken of my cousin, Leigh. Leigh, like me, is from Wisconsin. She moved out to California about four years ago to pursue acting while working as a graphic designer. She currently works for a little company you might have heard of called Beats by Dre, and while her main role is as a designer she did recently get to appear as "Pretty Girl #1" in one of their Solo Selfie commercials (shamelss cousin promotion here!) Click HERE to check it out. She's in the red dress :)
How does this play into my Photo Filled Shapes composition? I decided to use Leigh's relocation in my image. When she first moved here she lived in Venice. While the city doesn't smell too nice, it is a fantastic place to take pictures. I used a picture that I took of the graffiti walls in Venice to fill Leigh's skin. These are concrete walls on the beach that artists paint and re-paint--it's very colorful and ever-changing. I filled the background of the image with an image to represent Leigh's Wisconsin roots. I'm not going to lie--the picture is not actually from Wisconsin. It's from a trip we took to Sequoia National Park right here in California. Sorry if that ruins it for you, but I'm only in Wisconsin for a brief time each year and none of my landcapes worked well in this composition. I made the background black and white to represent the fact that it's in the past.
So there you have it. Look up Melinda Gibson's project called The Photograph As Contemporary Art to see the inspiration for this project.
