The thing about memories and old photographs is that as time goes by, what you remember of what you remember becomes less concrete in your head, and you begin to make up your own realities and construct your own past.
All babies look the same – kind of. So when we look at old photographs that don’t belong to us, we kind of place ourselves in that scene, and so begins a process of memory construction.
To really remove the identity of the person in the photograph, I thought of ‘erasing’ the facial features of said person in the photograph by physical means. Rubbing it off with turpentine seems to do the trick.
There are other methods too – like erasing, sand papering, liquid papering it off, but I really like that the turpentine preserves the original skin tone, and is easier to control (makes it easy to go for small, detailed areas).
Robert also threw out some ideas about physical alterations of photographs, and this really caught my eye:
I think this would tie in really well with the whole idea of memory being a distant thing, memories being distorted and ethereal etc. The instructions were fairly easy – plunge in hot water, put in cold water. But actually doing it was another thing in itself.
Then went looking for alternatives and recalled a photo-transferring process I’ve heard of before –
I think I’m heading in the right direction, but perhaps a thinner layer of varnish (it was too thick, so I wasn’t as close to the thin, fragile effect of polaroid emulsions).