What I truly love about Carolle Benitah's images is how she reworks into them. For example, the image above named à la plage, features two cut out bodies, and a body sewn with red thread. Upon research of Carolle's work, I know that the red thread features throughout her childhood photos, and an educated guess would probably mean that Carolle is the child under the red thread. However, what I also love about this image is how she composes the cut out bodies. The fact that she hasn't covered up or masked the holes left by the cut outs of the figures leaves an eerie sense of loss and leaves the viewer with a sense that the figures either aren't in Benitah's life, or they're not significant in her life anymore. 

What I also like about the composition of this image is how she still manages to incorporate the cut out figures at the bottom of her image, both lying down, one with their face scribbled out in purple and the other headless. 

What I did to create this mock up image is I printed off this childhood image of my grandma, sister and I. I then used a knife to carefully cut around the outline of my grandma, and then removed her from the image. The reason why I removed her was because she has passed away. The negative space left can represent that her passing has left a hole in our lives, and can also represent my slow fading memory of her. Although I do remember her, her silly habits and strong Scottish accent, the image of her face is slowly fading from my memory even though I don't want it to. I believe that is why I think photographs can be so precious, because it enables and aids people to cling onto precious memories, and remember those who we have lost.

I used adobe lightroom to then manipulate my images. I altered the saturation, vibrancy, contrast, highlights, shadows and clarity. Although this is just a mock up, it has given me an insight into what I want to do for my final pieces and what I can do to improve. Firstly I need to use high quality paper and a sharp knife to ensure there aren't any tags and rips. I may also want to layer the image on top of a piece of paper and work into the negative space. For instance I could cover the paper in glitter and when I place the image on top of the paper, then only the space of the cut out of my grandma will be filled with glitter. I could also maybe sew into my image and add extra minute details, such as a border around the cutout of my grandma. 

Overall I do like the concept behind both Carole's à la plage  and my rework of my image. However, after this experimentation I do want to further expand my reworking of my image by working with the negative space and adding more minute but significant details such as sewing into the image.