Digital Experiments
After studying Alex Williamson, I produced this series of digital collages to suggest the impacts and effects of air pollution. I made these collages using exclusively my primary source photographs from my different series such as: my ink experiments, my photographs of people in masks and my London photographs. To the left is the first alterations that i made to one of my photos, where i cropped one of my ink photographs and then duplicated it and enhanced the colours to explore how air pollution can be portrayed digitally.
Above is one of collages that i made to depict how air pollution affects both people and places holistically. I made this collage by having my ink experiment that used brown, orange and red ink to create the base layer and from there i blended in the skyline of London. The significance of this, is to suggest how London has been engulfed by this figurative air pollution and how it permeates throughout the city. The result of this, is that the people of London are subjected to hazardous living conditions which is implied by the girl clutching her throat whilst wearing a mask that was included into the bottom of the collage. By wearing the mask it demonstrates how people need to protect themselves from toxic air particles and by her clutching her throat it connotes how air pollution is still affecting peoples health and needs high level intervention. Therefore, this girl and this skyline of London serve as microcosm for not just London and its population, but the entire modernised world and the global community and how air pollution is a crisis found internationally.
This is another digital collage that i made, which focuses primarily on the girl in the mask. I originally had the girl be the final layer, however through experimentation i found that by fading in another ink layer on top, it changed the aesthetic of the digital collage by giving it a darker tone. In the second attempt, the air pollution demonstrated through the ink, surrounds her which provides a sense of oppression and immediacy that enhances the sense of danger.
These are four more digital collages that i created, with all four of them having the same base layer, however i added and enhanced different photos to each of these collages to see which style had the greatest visual impact. The first collage is the least edited with only a layer of my ink photographs and a photo of some of the buildings found in London. In the second collage, i faded in a primary source photograph that i took of New York, which symbolises how air pollution is an issue found not just in the UK but abroad in America as well. The third collage i enhanced an ink photograph to see whether this would elevate the sense of danger and create and oppressive environment. I used what i learnt in the third collage to create my fourth collage, which also had an enhanced layer of one of my ink photographs. However, i wanted to further emphasise the aspect of oppression caused by air pollution, which i demonstrated by using the black ink experiments ,which were the harshest photos and by having this spread throughout the collage. Each of these experiments developed my understanding of how to present air pollution, with the last two collages being the most interesting since they created a more dangerous atmosphere.