PATTERNS AND TONES

"Carla Braswell" from Home as Hat DECORATIVE THREAD “Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercouse.” — Sir Francis Bacon "What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language." — Miuccia Prada As this series begins to expand and solidify, I am very happy that I have chosen to hand craft these images with embroidery floss. This decorative thread is a 6 stranded cotton loosely twisted which comes in a stunning array of colors. It can also be made from silk, linen or rayon. I am keenly aware when selecting the color thread for each photograph. Symbolically, each color ton top of the black and white portraits are representing the spirit I see in the individual and their juxtaposition with their surroundings.  The textural and physical nature of stitching onto paper resonates wtih me.  The thread gives the images a thr...

"Circus Girl" from The Modern Merry Pranksters Series The second blog entry I did for Pattens and Tones was on a series I had created early on in my photographic career titled  Modern Merry Pranksters . The final color prints were constructed from 11 x 14" black and white photographs reshot in 4 x 5" color neg with textural boarders. As I began to scan this body of work, I was excited to look at them from a new perspective by viewing just the 35mm black and white portraits. Exploring ways of opening up the two dimensional perspective of a photograph, I had surrounded these portraits with fabric, powders, stickers, clay, marbled paper and other items to try to represent what I feel was their inner personalities. Then I reshot them with a 4x5 copy camera in color. But I had never examined these portraits separately from the context of my initial project. These portraits reflect my fascination with obscuring individual personalities with masks, unifying them ...