Right off the bat, I was drawn to the sci-fi appearance of
the first image. Being a huge fan of conceptual/surrealist/sci-fi art I had to
know what Peter’s process was. Interestingly, he takes photos from the early
1900’s and scans them in for some fun photo shopping. I fell in love with the idea of “futurizing ”
old photographs. He also intends to create wet plates of his images and maybe
even work them further from that point. All of this considered, I enjoy most if
not all his technical choices form old black and white photos to digital
manipulation and reprinting.
Conceptually,
they seem relatively straightforward to me. Although they are primarily
abstracted a bit, the concept stays in a future setting with an old school film
appearance. Reading a bit of his dialogue about his childhood, I started to
consider a possible deeper meaning. He was the only one in his family who
wanted to endlessly look through “old holiday pictures” as he stated. His
concept could reflect the fact he’s in a modern era with a vintage heart.
Essentially, I imagine his passion lies within the process of carefully
selecting and capturing photos, but unfortunately for him existing within this
day and age, quantity is a high demand in certain situations. Thus, taking old
photos and manipulating them is his way of getting the best of both worlds.
Similarly,
I myself enjoy photo manipulation, and greatly appreciate when methodical time
and thought are evident within a photo. Lastly, I believe the greatest
take-away I get from his series is manipulating premade photos. In the past, I
typically would stage a situation presumptuously for post-manipulation. Because
of this body of work, I am intrigued with the idea of shooting photos first,
and picking some afterwards to manipulate. Not to say my original planning method
is no longer valuable or something I no longer enjoy, only that, he has
encouraged me to expand and try a new work flow.
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