“I would position my camera over the open book, zooming in, trying to get exactly the right spot because there was no cropping except with scissors perhaps, and I would photograph her flowers, then I would roll back the film and photograph the portraits of her, trying to find the best composition to merge the colorful flowers with the black and white portraits. I’d repeat with the photos of her first and then the flowers on top. I don’t honestly remember if I would take one photo, roll back the film, and take the second photo right away, or if I would take the whole roll and then let magic disperse the second set of images onto the first. I think it was a combination of both as I experimented with my creative ideas.
Later on in the series, I would take double exposure photographs of the photographs I’d already taken. So, I would have a set of double exposure photos that I’d already done, and I would frame one in my camera and take a photo of it, roll the film back, repeat with another photo and create a double exposure of two double exposure photos. I also did collage style images, laying two or four or more photos out into squares or rectangles and using my camera to capture the entire layout as one new 4” x 6” image.”
Read about the experience of rediscovering these photos twenty-some-odd years later. And how it turns out they relate to the work I am doing today.
NOTE ON PHOTO SOURCES
I didn’t keep any records of which books I used to source the photos for my Georgia O’Keeffe series, a series that I took back in the 1990s. I am almost certain that the photos of young Georgia are from Georgia O’Keeffe, a portrait, a 1978 book by Stieglitz. I have tried to figure out which books I might have used to photograph her paintings as well as the of her in older ages, but I’m not sure; all I know is that they would have been published before 2000 and were likely large coffee table books.
