BTC Stands for "Behind the Curtain". Its a look at work created by various artists, photographers and creators around the world.
Its a small peak behind the curtain as to how the piece was created and the conceptual ideas behind it.
All art comes with a story.
Bodies Without Tombs is one of the more unusual pieces I've created. The background image was taken in St Joseph Cemetery in New Orleans, midday in the middle of the summer. I note the season and time because its about the worse time you can photograph tombs that have a lot of white wash on them. The glare alone can destroy attempts to photograph in a cemetery in the south. I took several hundred images that day with only about a quarter coming out even half way decent. This photo wasn't one of them.
In fact this was a pretty lousy image by my standards. It was washed out, the sky had no character and there were a tone of electrical wires, telephone poles and houses in the background.
But I chose the image because it was the right shape for the body I wanted to add to it. This is one of those times where I had the idea in my mind first for the piece and wanted to find one of my images that matched the idea.
A lot went into the prep work. All the wires, poles were carefully removed first. The houses were left for later. Then the image was transposed to reflect more of a night scene than midday. This is one of the good parts of photographing in midday. Few shadows to give away that a photo was not taken at night. Mind you a lot of my photos are taken at night, but this one not one of them.
Now I had to shift gears to the body. As you can see below, this was a real dead body from a 150 year old civil war photo.
For some reason this photo fascinated me. There was something about the position and the details that I found intriguing. Since I was exploring with low resolution imagery, I decided to merge the two photos together.
But in order to do so, I had to revise the original civil war photo to a much higher resolution and then carefully pluck him out of the original image. Unfortunately (as of the time of writing this) I am unable to locate my step by step images for the body. This is the problem with an art inventory this size. Sometimes things get lost in the database. But once had the removed the body from the original, I placed it carefully into the cemetery image.
The positioning had to be perfect. The body needed to look like it was not added, but already part of the art. Once i had it in place, I noticed that the body was too small. It was hard to make out the details and I wanted to remove the houses so I decided to resize the image to bring the body in closer.
This brought things into much better focus with the body and the high tomb to the left balancing each other. Now it was time to work on detailing. By transposing the image I'd lost a lot of the original detail of the image. I needed to bring some of it back while keeping that ghostly quality to the photo.
The first detailing highlighted some of the stone work in the tomb and began to bring some colors into the mix. Next was to bring more color out and to bring a more surreal feel to the image.
Unfortunately it darkened the image way too much. So a lightening had to be brought in to bring back details once more while still giving the illusion of dark shadows of night within the cemetery.
At this stage my intention was to not place this image in my cemetery series, but instead place it in Spirits of the Dead. The Spirits series usually reflects the spirit rising out of the body. So I played around with the concept and instantly hated it.
But there was one unintended result from adding the rising spirit. With a few adjustments it created an odd but interesting lighting on the body and the tombs behind it. For some reason it made the image more surreal yet more solid and real feeling. The body was more defined now. It felt right.
It was still too dark though, so some adjustments to make it look more natural were necessary. I also highlighted the orbs a light a little more to give the impression of spirits possibly wandering around the cemetery.
At this stage I thought the image was complete. In fact I'd even named it "Fireflies" but not added it the website and then promptly lost it within my database with a number of other pieces. When I rediscovered it again almost a year later, I'd honestly completely forgotten about it. I decided to revisit it before I posted it.
The first ting that stood out to me was the face. The face was too blank. It took away the personal aspect of the body. I thought about adding an actual face, but then I got thinking, New Orleans cemeteries have a lot of broken tombs. You can often look into them. You never see desiccated bodies, instead you see bones. Lots of bones. And that was where the final inspiration came to replace the head with a skull. Suddenly the image jumped into perspective for me. That grinning face was exactly what it needed. And that was when I renamed the piece to "Bodies Without Tombs".
Here was this sad sack of bones grinning at the world like he owned the place. It reminded me of so many bones I'd seen over the years just laying on the ground or propped in the corner of a half broke tomb, that it made sense to make it sort of a memorial to all those bodies which no longer had homes of their own.
And with that the piece was complete.
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