This project originated from the Photography and Cinema subject taught at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, in which the students were asked to buy a photograph from a second-hand bookshop, which would be the starting point for a sequence of images. At the beginning of the process, the photograph was scanned and colourised.
Starting with a landscape photograph, I decided to begin by taking pictures of the exterior, in order to correspond to the theme of the chosen image. This exterior represented a rural area, matching the reference: an almost aerial photograph of an area apparently made up of vegetation, with no buildings.
By collecting various photographs and following the teacher’s lead, we were able to digitally manipulate the images to create a composition that matched the reference. The first step was to fit the purchased (digitalised) photograph into the frame of the photographs, making it appear “camouflaged”.
The materiality of this photograph was taken into account: as it is an old object, the wear marks on the photographic paper were transposed to the new montages, as were the “white edges” in some of the experiments.
The final sequence resulted in pairs of specific experiments, containing similar aspects.
The first pair uses a landscape photograph closer to the reference, albeit from a point of view close to the ground. The montage consisted of superimposing half the composition of the reference, leading to a final image close to a dreamlike or surreal environment.
The second pair would be a tree that serves the purpose of a “curtain” that hides the landscape, corresponding to the chosen reference. The monochrome was appropriated from this, making an opposition between the foreground and the rest, as well as the “white edges” of the photographic object.
The third pair, from a higher point of view, captures spaces closer to a suburban area or wasteland, with accumulations of abandoned objects. The image is superimposed on the concrete elements present in the composition.
