I photographed the archival images I have of my grandad and the box I keep them in. These will be used as a comparison to what he used to be like, to what he’s like now. These images are extremely important to me as it shows him how I remember him. This was the man that inspired me to do many things and it makes me emotional to compare these to how he is now after his illnesses. I want my personal investigation to be a celebration of his life as well as documenting how the illness has changed his life and the lives of people around him.
Edits on Photoshop:
I edited these images on photoshop, I however decided that I don’t want to go down the root of editing by drawing on top of the photographs with the pen tool on photoshop. The main reason I don’t want to use these images is I don’t feel they suit the theme of my Personal Investigation as it a serious subject to explore, which I feel could be lost in these sort of edits as they could be seen as a type of animation, which is associated with children. I don’t feel this is appropriate with the theme I have taken on. Therefore I will edit these images in more of a mature way, still using shapes to show absents and presence of current things within the photograph. I will show this through shading specific parts of the image using photoshop, which is what I will be focusing on over the course of this month. I will do this subtly.
This image has been edited in photoshop, only half of the image has been manipulated to show the loss of feeling in one side of his body due to the stroke. He finds it difficult to move this part of his body and this is represented in the photograph by a darken the right side of the body/photograph. Also when you cover one half of the photograph each part looks like a different person to show how he has changed as a person both physically and mentally.
Similarly, I picked a section of the photo to overlay with a black filter, this is over my grandad who has sadly pasted away due to him being an alcoholic for years of his life. The death of my granddad is a sensitive subject to me as for years I had never seen him sober, exactly a month before his death he promised to stop letting alcohol take over his life… but he didn’t. This shows he is gone, I chose the colour black to show he died of something immoral or sinful. I feel hurt and betrayed by him but have learnt to forgive him.
This is a photograph from the 60’s of my granddad and his friends, in this photograph is he 21. The red overlay over half the photo is to show separation between the boys as the two underneath the overlay are not here anymore as they passed away over the last 5 years, which brought a lot of emotional to my granddad as he felt this was a part of his childhood disappearing. He currently still has his brother with him but doesn’t see him due to him too being ill, he also had a stroke, which could link to my granddad as an heredity factor. These 3 photographs were made to be grouped together to show a pattern of loss, shown though overlays.
Again this is showing loss but this time it is showing a loss of sight, my granddad lost his sight as a result of his second stroke. He found this particularly hard as he enjoyed reading in his space time and felt like everything he loved to do, was taken away from him. He now reads the newspaper with a magnifying glass but can not read a book due to the pain he feels if he is straining his eye to much. He only has one working eye as one was removed to see if it would take away the pain… but it didn’t, leaving him with one glass eye and one eye, which is partially blind.
This is a photograph when my granddad was about 19 years of age. The image is of his brother, his dad and my granddad himself (on the viewers right) the middle figure, which has been removed with an overlay, 100 opacity is his father, who they lost at a fairly young age. In this photo he is painted black to show loss but is painted as a silhouette figure to show he is still there but just not present in our world. He is still spoken about by my granddad as he looked up to his father and always says this is why hes the man he is today.
These are my granddad’s childhood friends, most of his friends are now dead, he only has 2 of them who are still alive today. They are both in this picture. The two people, which are covered by a black overlay to make an almost silhouette effect to show the absence of these people in my granddad’s life as they have both sadly passed away. The other two men in the photograph, which are either side of my granddad in the image are still alive, they are both fairly ill themselves so have not seen my granddad in a long time. But are hopefully going to make an appearance for my granddad’s 80th birthday in December. This photograph is to again empathises the absence and presence in my Granddad’s life.
Overall my theme for this selection of work is showing absence and presence and in particular loss. This will be a key theme when working through this project.