My Diptych Project
Photos Do Have a Life Beyond the “Snap”
A fellow author on Substack, Fernando Coelho, just completed a photographic challenge for photographers on Substack that allowed photographers to join together in pairs in a challenge of creation. In many ways, the project was simple and yet masterful. When two people come together to do anything, one never knows what will happen. The resulting creation can be most interesting. In this case, the pairing involved each photographer joining two photos in the form of a diptych, using one photo from each person in the pair. Here are the results and a link to the challenge results.
Of course, there were the photographic interactions, but there were also the human interactions. You can never tell how another person’s agenda is going to affect an activity.
As far as I was concerned, there were few rules specified for this challenge. But that is not what my partner thought. My partner was concerned that my manipulation of their photos (cropping, sizing, positioning) would reflect poorly on their photography. My partner pulled out of the challenge. And I did also as a result.
I was disappointed that my partner did so. That left me with no other option but to leave the challenge because all the other photographers had been paired. Nevertheless, the partner was only considering this decision in the context of the assumed implications about their work.
That said, I was not finished with the diptych project that Fernando proposed. I had conceived of another idea based on the Fernando’s challenge.
I have more than 100 photographs of Prague from a few years back. Sometimes photos will stick in one’s mind. This was the case with my Prague photos.
After looking at them various times in the recent past, I asked myself the question, how do these photos relate to one another? As I was thinking this, I had a flash. Art has a way of presenting itself and re-presenting itself. This was the case for my photographs of Prague.
As I looked at them, I saw a relationship between them and two kinds of vision. One of these was the vision looking up to something seen and the other was the vision looking down to something seen.
As an Earth-bound photographer living on this particular plane of existence, we spend a lot of time looking along the plane directly perpendicular to the way we stand or parallel to the ground we stand on. It is a view that is at 90 degrees to the plane. What happens to what we see when we look up at 60, 70, 80, or 90 degrees from our plane or the corresponding negative degrees down?
This was my flash. How did the photographs from Prague relate to one another looking up or looking down?
A new project was born.
Pair the photos by relating them to the two views — looking up and looking down.
The element I attribute to Fernando is to juxtapose a pair of photos as a diptych.
Originally, I would have juxtaposed these in a book where a relationship was more or less implied by photos being placed on opposing pages.
What about cementing the relationship between two photos by joining them at the hip, head, or tail? What would be the result of this joining? Furthermore, how does joining them in different ways change the meaning of the pairwise joining? All of these considerations are intriguing to me and worthy of some exploration. I also wouldn’t be constrained in that I could use the photos in any way I desired.
That is the result of my participation in Fernando’s challenge. Art is a remarkable and powerful influencer. Viewing art has always been influential for me. In this context, art is something to fuel new ideas. I look at art and marvel at the ideas forthcoming from any (and I do mean ANY) art. Art is a phenomenal gift of and to humanity.
Closing Comments
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It is wonderful to see that so much inspiration was derived from our challenge. Would love to see some of your diptychs and the stories behind them. I often “merge” photographs as well and don’t constrain myself to make conventional pairs or trios. I’ve also an article about my process on the making.