https://elputnam.github.io/SedimentaryPhotos/
I am continuing to develop collages in Photoshop using images that my dad and I took with some common subject, turning layers into assets, and reassembling as generative animations in p5js. This work very much connects to my practice in the 2000s, not only in that I am using images of that time, but also this kind of animated collaging technique is evocative of the first work I did in AfterEffects. I see how impatient I was as a photographer. The auto focus in my Canon D20 wrecked so many photos. The sensors were also dirty, leaving specks all over images, and I underexposed oh so many.
I wanted to create something with this photos sign. I recall my dad being amused by it but I am not sure why. Perhaps the 24 hour development turnaround seemed antiquated to him in 2007, but I also think of how the economic embargo had restricted access in Cuba to the consumer photographic technologies that abounded in our lives in the US. I layered these images with some photos of photos I took at the Museum of the Revolution within the former Presidential Palace. The photo of me is a selfie I took in a mirror there. It is layers of photos, layers of memories, presented like sediments of a core sample, political and personal — entangled.
