Happy Saturday everyone - Today's image is another from the HDR Collage series. I have always loved this particular image. It's bold and colorful, and both the subject of this image as well as the source images represented New York for me. I used it for a long time as a prototype for a brand logo, but I found that the simplicity of this image undermined the true nature of the image itself, and in a way defined both one of my loves of this series as well as one of my struggles. Often the outputs I get, the final images, are deceptively simple representatives of the process and could therefore be largely unappreciated. This isn't to tout my horn here, but rather to be an advocate for a style of art that encompasses the value of the creation process within the final piece. This is an exceptional challenge and possibly one that undermines the ultimate goals of "art," but I have always been fascinated by history and origin stories, so why shouldn't we include this in our artistic expressions as well. This piece's story begins in Dumbo -
I used to work in a consulting office in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn. Near my office was a small triangular square surrounded by several buildings most of which had various murals. My favorite of all time, was one completed by a local artist and used these vibrant oranges and reds to create a geometric representation of elephants and monkeys. It sounds strange writing it, but in person, it was truly a spectacular mural. And this was a city of graffiti and murals and there was no shortage of contenders. On my way to work every morning, I would make a point to pass along a route that went by this particular mural and when I went out for coffee I did the same. So naturally, I had a taken a few pictures over the years of the artist's work on this wall. This was also about the time, I had accidently discovered the first steps of the HDR Collage process and I was experimenting one night.
I was playing around with a quick snapshot of a bicycle wheel taken from the neighborhood and started to compile it with a few pictures of the mural. The result changed the game for me on this series. Previous efforts had created these abstract, geometric constructions, but this time, the use of the mural wall and a simple foreground subject blended together seemlessly in a vibrant, near-neon composition that almost seemed like a new mural. I thought the potential could be limitless. I had combined two symbols of my experience of Brooklyn together into a single, representative piece.
Several years later, the mural was painted over and lost forever to me outside of the pictures I made of it. The elephants and monkeys were lost in the collage here, but I will always see this image as a symbol of my life in NY. It was a time of experimentation in my photography, a time of appreciation of other art, and a time of observing and chronicling symbols of everyday life. This one frame is the closest I got to representing all three in one go. Enjoy your Saturday -
