She Was In The Monitor

So the Idea…

During this project I was back home in the US from Ottawa. Lil holiday break, y’know how it goes. It was a little unfortunate in my timing because the portraiture unit in school was the exact reason I came to SPAO initially. Luckily I had already done some portraits beforehand. These specific ones were of my girlfriend, still living in Canada. 

One night we were on FaceTime. She wanted to see some of the portraits we had done together on the shoot. I had my monitor up and I was scrolling through the images. I started to notice that the screen on the monitor was showing up differently than what the actual photo looked like. It added a softness and color richness that the initial photo had not possessed. I was trying to figure out how to recreate it through photoshop. Change the brightness? Add a gradient? I was a little stumped. After a few minutes of frustration (still on the facetime call) I remembered the feeling of the darkroom at SPAO. How it felt to have the image right in front of you. Being able to physically touch the negative. And that’s what was missing. I wasn't able to touch the image because it was locked behind the monitor.

But what if the monitor was the image? I made this connection after looking at the screenshots I took on the facetime call. The way to recreate this was to take a photo of the screen!