New Portraiture – Process Special

‘New Portraiture’ was a collaboration originally started with Nick O’Brien in 2006. The project was an attempt at creating a new photographic process of imagemaking, by adding elements of time and personal authorship we explored what extent the complexity of a human being can be caught through a photographic portrait.

The project mainly took place over 6 months in 2006—07, for the most part we where deconstructing and modifying flat bed scanners to achieve the right results.

Photography works on the relationship of two basic principles; the control of light (aperture) and controlling how much light is exposed (speed). A scanner has a understanding of these principles – programmed as a set of resolutions, e.g 150dpi. Our first experiments where to gain understanding of how a scanner is programmed through their isolation.

The first three scanners we went through where crude experiments to understand what happens inside the scanner; what happens when you isoljate the bed motor, what happens when you uncase the scanner, what part of the scanner actually scans, is the scanners housing purely for protection, what effect does the built in lightsource have, are these components integral for creating a portrait? etc

This for example was a crude experiment after demobilsing the scanners motor (scanners work similar to a photocopier… they pass the scanner from left to right to create an image. We disabled the motor to test if this could be controlled manually on wheels, or like a wand.

The results where interesting but inconclusive, image results wheren’t reliable because the motor is programmed in time with the ‘f-stop’.

Back to the drawing board we started understanding the scanner more and how it fundamentally worked. I say fundamentally in a lose terms because realistically any adjustments where physical ones because the scanning software was locked and open source alternatives didn’t exist.

After understanding the basics, we set about how to create images from what is designed to scan flat artwork (i.e paper) to capturing the image of a real; 3D object. How can we create a real photographic representation with a scanner?

Scanners have very different jobs to camera’s, we decided to experiment with how the portrait was taken, thinking that the scanner might only have the capacity to work in the place of film. Here you can see one of our experiments using the flatbed as a photographic plate behind a 5×4 lens. We thought that the 5×4 would allow us to focus an image and play with depth of field…

… But the results weren’t good enough, sure enough they where an approvement to anything we had achieved, we could see ‘an image’, but how a scanner records an image resulted in most of the image recorded was the insides of the camera…

The 5×4 camera however had bellows… which adjusted the distance between the lens and the plate; this allowed you to zoom out so to speak. As light only travels in straight lines only a limited diameter of light was hitting the scanner. We thought that by increasing the distance between the plate and the lens we would allow a larger plateau of light through the lens hitting the entirity of the plate.

We took apart the 5×4 large format camera and made larger bellows with blackout material, image results where inconclusive but essentially we felt that the project had gone a little off course to different territory; essentially what we had started to create was a ‘Digital Camera Obscura’ as the bellows we made ended up being a 4 meter long room. We were very interested in this but essentially knew Digital Camera Obscura’s and Portraiture projects where different, so we parked this developemnt keen to look into Digital Camera Obscuras at a later date.

After the shortcomings of previous experiments we realised that we where swimming against the current; without being able to re-programme the variables of the scanner we were approaching at a wrong angle. Then it dawned on us to use how the scanner works as integral to how the portrait is made. If a image is made from left to right, then this should be a design feature etc.

Scanners are designed to scan International Paper Sizes. Portraiture has no set rules of these proxemities; so we realised that we ought to challenged the scanners’ proxemities. We created a (admittedly crude) dolly to use the left – right way the scanner reads to scan the whole body.

The tricky thing was that a scanner uses a set amount of light created by an built in lamp, this wasn’t two much of a problem here; the main problem was that the scanner uses the motor to time how long the image is exposed for… bizarrelly some longer exposures i.e 1200dpi in actuality takes less time than 600dpi, and we’d previously found that disabling the motor pretty much kills the scanner. We had to trickily time how long to push the dolly over the subject in time with the motor whilst constantly moving. Tricky.

Below you can see how in post-production an A4 captured image could translate into a proportional portrait.

Sure enough these portraits taken with the dolly where the most succesful yet; but we weren’t keen on them needing post-production editing, we wanted the portraits to be as true as possible. Coming from a very digital process the portraits needed to speak for themselves and stand up for themsleves, adding further digital processes after a complicated image making process seemed to detract from the idea… so we took a couple of steps back again.

We developed the scanner and how we isolated elements, much time was spent testing the equipment and it’s restraints in respect to the basics of photography e.g depth of field, lighting, movement etc. The most successful part of the dolly experiments was how we’d finally started being able to light a portrait, so we concentrated on maing this work next…

After 5 months of experiments we where achieving technically portraits that fitted the brief. We had set out to create a new photographic process of imagemaking, by adding elements of time and personal authorship we explored what extent the complexity of a human being can be caught through a photographic portrait.

Some examples:

From the beginning we were interested in the phrase ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ which lead us on to exploring what a scanner does – it creates a composite of thousands of images into one; splices of time captured and brought together to give a fuller portrait. At 600 dpi a portrait lasts 2 minutes whereas a normal camera might take a portrait that only tells you 1/60th of a second.

It seemed logical to us that a portrait that lasts two minutes needn’t be restricted to just an image. A two minute window of time allowed the ’sitter’ to have personal authorship of their portrait, they can express themselves through body language and movement and most importantly… they can talk. The final set up of the portraits allowed us to digitally record the audio of the portrait, you’ll see later how this was used

Here’s a picture of my final portrait taken halfway through the 600dpi. During the portrait, I spoke for two minutes, authoring the portrait for what I wanted it to say.

After the scanned portraits where taken we repeated the portrait with a digital slr. This second portrait was taken at 1/60th of a second, again we wher to speak aloud during the project.

The project has been resolved in two ways, a physical set of prints and later developed into a film.

The prints are presented in a photographers archive box, and protected with digitally printed archive paper. This wrapping paper introduces the project and asks ‘If a picture is worth a thousand words; what is the value of a thousand pictures?’

Inside the first portrait can be found from the digital slr, layed out along the golden section the print reveals the image, the time signature and a transcript of the audio.

The second portrait, created by the scanner follows this format, we found it fitting that both portraits be printed digitally, the digital camera on paper, and we printed the scanners portrait on aluminium dibond, as we felt the materiality would add another dimension as well as suggesting it was the more authoritive, longer lasting portrait of the two.

My final ‘image’:

Nicks final ‘image’;

And below you can see how the time signature of the portraits effected the layout. And how much each medium allowed for personal authorship over your self portrait.

Finally a year after we made the set of prints it seemed a logical step to make these portraits into films, you can see my portrait below. Thankyou for reading!