I've been looking over some of my earliest efforts at making comics lately, the stuff I did back before I could draw. That photo-collaged work obviously loses something to its lack of handmade content, but I like the directness of it, how willfully I was going about doing "experimental comics". Much as the mannerisms of drawing style are a part of comics, the way I interact with the medium it also takes a lot of setting aside before I can get to the actual content. Photographic imagery is more objective, maybe more communicative. "This is a picture of ______", with nothing getting in the way. I also think found imagery is a fun, useful thing to bring into my comics, because it dictates content that I wouldn't have thought up myself.
So: I found the photo negatives that make up this comic at LA's famous Fairfax Trading Post today, in the bins full of random old pictures. I love looking at photo negatives a lot more than I like looking at finished photography, I guess because it doesn't look like the real world looks at all, but still unmistakably represents it. Negatives are a lot like drawings that way. And strips of negatives, like the ones in the middle of this comic, are about as close to the comics form as photography gets. They're always so small, though -- these pictures are about half an inch tall in real life -- that it's tough to really live inside them, to drink them in as imagery. (Though that too is undeniably part of their ghostly charm.) So I thought I'd blow them up and put them online, big enough for the eye to really inhabit. I think the resulting photocopy-machine grit is a pretty tasty extra, deteriorating the objective quality of the photographic image a little bit, bringing it back into dialogue with drawing. But it's like a drawing done by a machine: human hands are still nowhere near this stuff. Negatives always creep me out, and I know I'm not the only one... maybe that's why. Regardless, that's where the title "Ghost House" comes from.
8 comments:
Great stuff! Unsettling.
Uncanny. I'm spooked.
Interesting one, Matt. I've been making a lot of photo comics lately and researching them a bit (trying to find decent examples that are trashy fumetti).
I think this would be a little more effective where the photos smaller (or they were displayed in a different medium where the size wouldn't matter so much), so the reader could see more than one of the images at a time.
I remember going through a period doing one of the photo classes I took where I felt the need to show the sprocket holes on every photo I printed. It has taken on a bit of an archaic look these days.
Err... sentence 1 para 2 I mena "were the photos" not "where the photos".
You could be right about the size: I did it this way cause I wanted the big deep-immersion Tumblr effect, like a "1981" thing... but like a riso-printed zine version could be pretty sick too.
I love those sprocket holes... there was some artist who did a few sex shorts in 80s Heavy Metal who would border his panels with them, I always thought that was kind of cool.
Nice images. I never considered the similarities between the photo strip and the comic strip. I'd like to see what you would do by creating your own negs. Would you have a story in mind before you made your strip or would you write up a dialogue to fit the imagery after you created your negs?
I find the sprocket holes attractive. When the sprocket holes are included it reveals to the viewer the creator's unedited composition... no crops, no slices, no extractions... just the edit and the vision before the snap. If the enlargements were small enough to see the whole image without having to scroll up and down, the message might be stronger. Or maybe it's the effect that you're seeking as is. The tension of the composition that is larger than what you can see without adjusting your perspective. Maybe you want the viewer to look closer and dismiss the whole. If this is true, I would like to see the negs enlarged even bigger. I'm not sure why but the grit is a treat...
I 've lived with negs for a long time. I think of them as untold stories. Some ready to be shared and some not.
I'm not sure how much time you have had with a camera but I like the direction you have taken with the negs as found imagery.
I dunno how I'd approach doing any further photo-comics... haven't really thought about it since this is really more of a side trip from the drawn stuff than anything else. (There's one other thing similar to this I'm thinking of doing, but it probably won't happen for a while.) Of the older photo comics I linked to, one was based in found imagery and one had the... I don't want to say "story" but I had the idea first. As for putting dialogue over photos, I've rarely seen it work well -- some of those old Italian fumetti have a cool kitsch factor but that's about it, really. And you need basically a movie set to pull those off.
The large size, like I said, was my attempt at a deep-immersion thing... kinda Blaise Larmee 2001 style. Maybe I will post an image of the full strip somewhere if people keep asking. I did re-sequence the images on it though, to make it feel a bit more narrative.
The 'figure' negatives are wonderful. They're like memories- lost lovers
people who have faded from your life, maybe even future memories of those who you have yet to meet.
It's the movement of darkness upon darkness and the flares of light at key edges and contours. Different frames, different gestures, different associations and affects. These things go deep.
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