Experimenting With Double Exposure

An image from Lewis Bush’s Metropole

In Lewis Bush’s ‘Metropole’ he used a technique of double exposure. In response to this approach to presenting the shapes and features of buildings I have attempted to create edits by layering photographs over eachother to create confusion and an abstractness within the photographs. This links to the theme ‘Variance and Similarity’ because it explores the fact that there are an increasing amount of large buildings for offices or flats taking away from green land and so the landscape in which we live is turning into a repetitive view of similar flats and offices leaving citizens with a feeling of monotony as everything is being redeveloped to serve the same purpose. By using a double exposure technique it is merging together both similar and different building faces to create one abstract and abnormal building face. Bush’s work on ‘Metropole’ shows a lot of emphasis on the repetition between buildings due to his double exposure effect.

I think that my experimentation with using double exposure whilst drawing inspiration from Lewis Bush has resulted in a type of composition that is both familiar and unfamiliar – similar to the feeling that John Coplans evokes in his audience with his photographs of his different body parts. I believe that this method of presentation is effective as it catches the eye and forces the viewer to think about what they are looking at as well as picking apart the image but I think that when trying to convey the theme of ‘Variance and Similarity’ it may compromise the ability of the photographs to show the differences between different buildings as well as the similarities within them due to the fact that it merges the buildings together. Although saying this, upon looking deeply into the features of the photograph the viewer will spot features of different houses and will be able to see features that do not belong to the base house in the photograph and so will be effective in establishing the different individualistic features that belong to each house. Therefore I will not write off this method of experimentation as it achieves the aim of causing the viewer to look deeper into the photographs.

An example of my experimentation of using double exposure

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