Birthe Piontek is a Vancouver-based photographer is most widely recognised for her intimate, narrative-driven portraits.

Most of her work has a straightforward approach. In her recent series “Mimesis” she’s uses images that have a meaning and background to create collages which displays her personal portraits with an investigation into the complexity of human identity.

Piontek searches for found images on Ebay, in thrift stores and flea markets. She primarily looks for images like studio portraits and other non-candid scenarios in which the subject has direct eye contact with the camera.

She knows little about the people in the photographs, she uses them as source material to create her own fictions about their identities, she said, “I usually spend quite a bit of time with the image, looking at it and familiarising myself with it.”

Once she likes the outcome of a photograph, Piontek scans it, then reproduces the image, in many cases working from its copy. She begins manipulating the copy, sometimes cutting into it and incorporating other materials like glass, paint, foil and fabric to give the image an entirely new form. 

I would like to experiment in Photoshop in the style of Birthe Piontek. I would like my final outcome to be like the first image in this post, where the face out of the head.