Project 1 - Ambiguous Doppelgangers

Earlier today we looked at the work of Kelli Connell's fantastic body of work in which she combines multiple instances of a model to ambiguous, fictionalized scenes. In much of the series, the relationship between the two figures is unclear. Be sure to read her artist statement.

There are many people who create work with multiple instances of the same person.

Cornelia Hediger includes one of more instances of the same person in her Doppelganger series. Aesthetically and emotionality very different from Kelli Connell's work, Cornelia creates an image from six (or more) separate images. She appears to change the focal length of the lens that she uses and/or changes her distance to the subject. The vantage point of the camera, and thus the perspective, is also changed. The figure is often out of registration with itself. It creates a very fractured and rather whimsical look. She demonstrates a very sophisticated use of color. She makes use of monochromatic color schemes as well as complementary color schemes.

Wikipedia definition of doppleganger. Pretty interesting reading. Gave me lots of ideas..

Here is a very interesting Wikipedia definition of a phenomena known as bilocation.

Tomoko Sawada

I came across a Japanese artist by the name of Tomoko Sawada who has created a number of series exploring the many different facets of her personality. She has a series similar the Ambiguous Doppelganger series that you are currently working on (I just made up that project name, but I am going to stick with it). Interestingly, she also has a series in which she photographed herself daily over a prolonged period of time. She used a photobooth for that series.

A nice blog entry on her work.

Gallery with some of her work.

Canon Award write up on Tomoko Sawada

Newsweek article on Tomoko Sawada

Brooklyn Museum of art website with examples of her work

Tomoko Sawada's website - it is in Japanese and thus hard to navigate

Project 1 - Ambiguous Doppelgangers

Your first project is to create a body of work inspired by her work. First find a friend who will serve as your model. You will need to work with the person a lot, so chose carefully. Think of two different personae for the model. In each image, the model should appear as both personae. If your find that your model is a total ham and over 'acts' everything, then switch models.

Ideally, a viewer of the work wouldn't immediately (or ever) realize that the people depicted throughout the series is really the same person. You are going to create a series of four images for this project.

If you are interested in creating work such as this, there are a number of technical/logistical things to be aware of when shooting. Here is a list that of things to keep in mind:

Must shoot RAW.
Must set exposure once, use same exact setting for each of the two (or more) shots.
Must focus once, don't refocus between shots. This will require you to leave your camera on manual focus after initial focus. Think through where you need to focus at. Consider depth of field issues.
If you have a more compact camera that doesn't offer manual focus, see if you can set your focus by at predetermined distance.
White balance can be synced in Camera Raw, but must be the same for each image.
Must use a tripod. Take care not to bump the camera between exposures. Use a remote release if you have one.

Between shots, you need to change the appearance of your model. Consider the following:
clothes
hair
jewelry including ear rings, piercings, watches, bracelets, etc.
glasses
facial hair?
make up - some then none, do it differently, etc.
shoes, you can change someones apparent height by changing their shoes...
tight fitting and then baggy clothes?
general style of clothing.. street than dress clothes?

Also keep in mind that friends dress alike. So, if you are trying to create a sense that these people are friends, then they might dress similarly.

Remember, you want to create a series of four in which the relationship of the people is ambiguous. All the rules of design still apply. Avoid flat looking images in which the subject is in the same plane each time.

Domestic scenes may work well?

Then you need to edit the RAW images exactly the same. Then you need to combine them.
Here is a link to an tutorial on how to Combine multiple images into a group portrait.

Although the intent of the tutorial is different, it is exactly the same thing. Here is a link to a video on Aligning Layers by Content.

Avoid the obvious things like a person playing cards with themselves.

You may want to take three or more images to bring back down to one. Here is Ohio we get a fair amount of snow. I was thinking of an image where the person is walking through the snow with one another. Of course you would create footprints as you leave the scene to go change. If you took a photo before you had your model walk into the scene, then you would have a photo to mask back the snow from. You could do it with just two shots, but it seems like the third one would come in handy.

Ultimately, the composites need to work well as images. It is not enough to get all the technical aspects correct. You need to create compelling images.