from the series: Wish You Were Here
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Tag: <span>Avard Woolaver</span>
April Fool’s Day is approaching, and if you are thinking of a trick for your kids or grandchildren, you can do it with photo tricks. This can be done in several ways, but perhaps the most fun is the use of forced perspective—a way photographers use optical illusions to make an object appear farther away, closer, larger, or smaller than it actually is.
This is going to go over best with really young children. You can set up a shot to make the child look bigger or smaller than an object in the frame, and give it to the kid to “fool Grandma” or “fool Dad.” It takes a tiny bit of pre-planning but isn’t much work, and doing it creates a warm memory you share with the child.
You might want to use familiar objects that are part of the child’s everyday world—a stuffed toy, a porch railing, your car—for instance, you can set up a shot so that the child seems to be balancing the car on one upturned hand.
Photo manipulation and trick photography has been present since the beginning of the photographic medium in the 1800s. In 2012, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York showed how photographers long before the digital era regularly employed techniques of manipulation in their work. Mia Fineman, assistant curator of photography at the Met, told PBS, “Fake decapitation was the LOLcats of the 19th century.”
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Photo tip: For successful forced perspective shots, use a tripod; use a wide-angle lens, and an aperture to keep subjects in focus (f16 of f22). If you want to force perspective to create an illusion of size then use two subjects that are universally recognized–the palm of a hand and a car, or a fence post and a skier.
“Stay Posted” is from the series: Wish You Were Here
We can learn a lot about people by looking at their hands. Close-up photos of them are often taken when the subjects are newborns or elderly people, but probably relatively few are taken during other phases of life. Hands can say a lot about our interaction with each other and with the world. UK photographer Tim Booth believes the hands tell a more honest story about what a person has been through than faces.
American portrait artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) paid particular attention to hands in order to reveal his sitters’ temperament. Stephanie Herdrich, in an article on the Metropolitan Museum website, writes, “Sargent’s accentuation of hand gestures reveals details about his sitters’ personalities or moods and, in some cases, the sitters’ relationship with the artist.”
Another thing you might take note of when photographing is how your own hands are changing over time. For me, it’s one way I see my own age. In the past few years I’ve developed vitiligo (loss of skin pigmentation, resulting in white patches) on my hands; they look quite different from the way they did a few years ago. It doesn’t bother me and I don’t try to cover it up—it’s mostly a cosmetic thing, not a real health concern—but it is a part of me that has changed, and changed quickly. Since I respond to so much of my daily life from my perspective as a photographer, one way I can notice physical changes over time is through photographs.
You’ve no doubt had the familiar sinking feeling that comes from looking through photos from a few years earlier and thinking, Wow, I’m getting old. I looked so much younger then. (When it hasn’t even been that long, sometimes.) This is something my wife and I talk about often. Age is always at our heels; youth is always receding in the mirror.
Nothing keeps reminding us of that like ordinary snapshots. In that sense, the snapshots that document our most everyday moments become the ones that most accurately chart our passage through time.
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Photo tip: It’s a worthwhile endeavor to document the hands of family members over time to see the effects of time and age.
“Hands” appears on Photo Vogue–Vogue Italia website.
In analog photography, the image is invisible and remains hidden on the film until it magically appears during development. Poetry can remain in our minds like a latent image. Here is a poem I wrote about this phenomenon.
Latent Image
Immersed under a film of random moments
A whisper of time when all was exposed
Then quickly hidden in a latent image
Time passed, time past
The moment is, the moment was
But I remember it differently:
I thought the light on the horizon
Was a holy orb
Lifting my spirit upward
I needed the picture to be whole
–Avard Woolaver, 2017
“Sunrise on Gerrard East, Toronto, 1982” is from the book: Toronto Flashback (1980-1986)
With the digital revolution, there are more and more photos being taken. It can seem that any particular photo has already been taken numerous times. An interesting piece by Teju Cole in the New York Times relates that photos we see can remind us of other photos. In my case, they often remind me of songs.
A photo of Route 14 in Hants County, Nova Scotia, inevitably brings to mind John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Railroad tracks remind me of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” Strip malls remind me of Talking Heads “Once in a Lifetime,” and springtime calls forth “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles.
Here’s a finding that interests me: “Brain process involved in sight have found the visual cortex also uses information gleaned from the ears as well as the eyes when viewing the world.” This is according to a team of neuroscientists at the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow. Professor Lars Muckli, who led the research, explained in an article for their university magazine, “Sounds create visual imagery, mental images, and automatic projections.”
Sometimes it’s the imagery in the song; sometimes it’s linked to a memory associated with the song.
“Don’t you wonder sometimes ’bout sound and vision,” David Bowie asked us in the song “Sound and Vision.” Yes, we do.
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Photo tip: Think of a few of your favourite songs and try to take photos that match them.