Of course it is happening inside your head, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

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.

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All babies look the same. This could very well be you

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:

polaroid-lifts
Polaroid emulsion lifts

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 –

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Acrylic varnish and white glue
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Used an old print from the previous project, coated one half with the varnish and the other half with the glue
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Submerge in a tub of water, paper side down after varnish has dried
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Use fingers to rub off wet paper
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Transfer back onto another surface after paper has all been rubbed off
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White glue, even after drying, began to dissolve in the water. Bond wasn’t strong so glue tore and fell apart. Couldn’t rub off any paper at all too
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Before drying
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After everything has dried, the pieces coated with acrylic were almost like leather pieces, kind of like fabric, making it easy to bend and manipulate

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).