Weed Scans

Following somewhat in the vein of Denis Doran again I began to think about using the scanner to create some work. Unlike his work in Common Grounds, I am not tied to a particular location or space, therefore the collection of ephemera would be a process which would add little to my work, as well as this the idea of collecting objects which exist already in a physical capacity would not fit with my concept.

Instead I chose to scan in the plants themselves, this is also to do with the inability to reproduce Doran's technique of a portable flatbed scanner which he brings to the environment, however should yield similar results.

I began by quite simply placing the dried plant onto the scanner, using a black background so as to make it more like my previous work and to avoid the sterility created by an intensely white background. The scanned images can be seen below, however I didn't feel that this quite fitted with my other pieces for several reasons, the image did not have the same 'trailing off' that previous images taken with the polaroid had, the way they gradually faded out into the dark background. They also lacked something compositionally, not containing the quite intimate compsotions previously but looking very clinical and detached. One of these scans can be seen below.

I began to crop the image down into smaller pieces of detail which I felt matched my previous work much better, compositionally and from the aspect of lighting too. This meant that the images did require some work in Photoshop, changing the brightness and contrast, as well as some other simple filters to remove dust etc. As with any scanned images these scans have a very shallow depth of field, yet I feel this adds to these pieces, picking out high-detail and contrasting it with out-of-focus midgrounds and backgrounds. This lends a dream-like quality to the images. Some of the better crops can be seen below.