This idea was inspired by the work of Carole Benitah and was my take of portraying geographical identity, as well as portraying the passage of time. Carole has a series of images where she has taken old family photos and either cut them up, or draw/sew over them to create unknown figures amongst a normal portrait or background.
To make my idea I used a photo from a small bay behind St Aubin’s fort called Belcrout bay, which used to be very popular for its diving stage during the late 1930’s, because its a place my subjects grandparents often visited.
I had more photos from the same photoshoot so it was easy to cut out a subject from the other photos as they had the same angles and lighting. After I had added him in and adjusted the colours I used the magic wand tool to select a portion of his body which I then used layer-via-cut on to remove them from the layer. I duplicated. I added in photos of old discoloured paper behind the layer. To finish it I used the marquee tool to remove sections behind them revealing the black and white layer I had created earlier.
Original image After the process