Masks

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These are ‘found’ unaltered by-products reclaimed from my fine-art portraits, and commercial work. From each ‘classical’ portrait I take, I pluck one or several masks, almost like hidden dark sides, in parallel to the portraits. It’s a very long-running series, and I have thousands of them.

 

In processing digital pictures, an image is often built up using a number of layers in software such as Photoshop. These masks are a Photoshop layer which ordinarily would not be the top layer; a different (but equally integral) component of the final image is allowed to be the surface. The extraction and foregrounding of a different aspect of an object fundamentally changes the nature of the object.