Nationwide lockdown has been challenging for all personal and professional relationships. Me being a bit of a closeted romanticist I wanted to make a piece using the materials and equipment I have available in the house to be able send a very personal and embarassingly lovey-dovey poem paired with photographs in the post.
My initial inspiration were studio portraits taken on those sky blue backgrounds from about the 70s-80s, they are so common but classic for the time and I had a blue backdrop I’ve been wanting to use – its more playful and nostalgic than the classic white backdrop. I wanted the composition to be very simple – close and direct to the camera, like school pictures. I do not have a working printer at home so I made use of my polaroid camera. I looked at Andy Warhol’s and Stevie Nicks’s polaroid self portraits and decided that the aesthetic would be very different to what I had initially planned. Without the right lighting and printer I will have to wait another day to create a portrait similar to those.
I taped translucent paper over part of the flash bulb on my polaroid camera so my features weren’t completely washed out with light. I wrote out the poem and made a hand-folded envelope from blue card. After creating these I used a scanner to create different compositions with all the materials and added different elements to experiment such as; ribbon, leaves, marbled paper, pages of the works of Shakespeare.
After sending off the envelope in the post, I used the scanned images to create more compositions in Adobe Photoshop by adding more layers and highlighting certain aspects, and also by taking away certain elements leaving more simplistic images.
I’d call this my final digital version of this piece, as the physical piece (true final piece) no longer belongs to me after sending it off. I used the composition I created using the scanner, but added the marbled paper as a backdrop surface and framed it with a soft green colour to emphasise the references to nature in the poem. I wanted to avoid the typical romantic colours like pink and red and emphasise the more innocent, peaceful and homely aspects of a romantic relationship.
oliverclarkephotoppp1 