Old City/New City

I started with this prompt and a very watery idea of what I might do. There were words floating through my head in various forms of order and association: life, death, youth age, presence, absence, remembrance, forgetfulness  and so forth. As I usually do, I throw a mental dart and go for whatever idea it sticks to first; something that doesn't make my frown at least.

I believe I started looking for shots of young and old people, of new buildings and old buildings and of new signs and old signs. That quickly changed to me taking pictures of anything that looked gritty, used, industrial and sort of lived in and worn upon.

When I got the photos into photoshop I knew I wanted to alter them but was torn between altering them overtly, or covertly. I didn't know if I wanted my hand to be apparent in the photos. As I started working though, I began to notice I was inclined to use a heavier hand in editing. I wanted dark, gritty, high contrasting, high intensity and a higher saturation than the original photo had. So I went with it. I realized I enjoyed the whimsical, illustrative/graphic and painterly quality the photos began to exude. How this relates to Old City/New City I believe is found in a transformative process from the old images of reality to the more emotive and impassioned images of the New City I was compelled to created.

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