The Art - Photography

The Child Experiments with Filming His Imagination
Digital photo with post processing
2006

On the series: These portraits were more collaborative efforts with my young son, than my simply taking pictures of him. He would prepare a situation and would ask that a picture be taken, which is how the series began. He wanted to see how what he'd dreamed up looked like through the eye of the camera, and enjoyed having it preserved--probably like most children. Then when I was working on a picture in post production I would ask him what he thought as we both conjured a photo befitting his dream.

On this photo: H.o.p. enjoys filming little movies and taking hundreds of photos learning stop animation. He is always drawing and making clay sculptures, but when doing his stop animation he is satisfied with cruder elements. What he sees through the camera lens is what he sees internally. It's obvious that the world around him disappears and what remains before him is a fantastic scene he has created in his mind. He spent several days in June laboring over a film involving ice and water, cutting up and crumpling bits of white paper and setting them carefully upon a dark blue fleece blanket. It was obvious what he was going for and what he was seeing, but of course in all the hundreds of shots he took the flash of the camera highlighted the fleece of the blanket. Still, he labored on, hopeful, and determined to film the scene. When he was done he decided not to put it together into a movie but was not very disappointed despite all the work. "It's all part of learning," he said.

Here, H.o.p. is taking stills for a stop animation of a vampire fighting robot disguised as an alien bird.

H.o.p.'s favorite color is blue. I did several versions of this--a gold, a color, a black and white and a blue. I asked H.o.p.'s opinion and he voted for the blue.
(childskylgflatfb)