Lisa Sorgini | Daily Patterns

After loving Lisa Sorgini's food stamps series I decided to look at more of her work through visiting her website and Tumblr blog where she posts little experiments and more personal work. A series called daily patterns really caught my eye in which Sorgini took black and white photographs and added shapes digitally. Like her food stamps series the patterns affect the mood of the original photograph by making our eyes look in specific places and follow the movement of the shapes on top. 

The photograph above shows a woman who appears to be sleeping at a table. The white dots Sorgini has added gives the effect of tears coming from the subject's eyes into the milk glass, which to me gives off this feeling of hopelessness. Because the subject fills the frame it really allows us to draw our focus onto her and be affected by this feeling of disheartenment. I also like the use of black and white which really emphasises the shapes and contrasts rather than the colours in the image which gives more emphasis to the bright white shapes she's used.

Looking at these photos by Lisa Sorgini has inspired me to try adding shapes onto my own photographs. I decided to do this with paper at first onto my printed photographs to experiment with shapes and positioning.

This is my favourite from the printed experimentations as I like how the shape tilted with my subject's face which creates a path for the viewer's eye to follow. As printing the photos on normal paper creates a more grainy quality I worked with the more grunge texture by ripping my paper into a a rough shape to create a more damaged look to this picture, which I think is quite effective.

I also tried cutting shapes out of paper and around some of my pen drawings inspired by Claude Heath. I'd like to try creating more imagery with this technique as I think it really adds my own personal style to the image. 

After adding shapes to my printed photos I decided to try adding patterns digitally to some other photos I've taken and experimented with different shades of grey as well...

This is my personal favourite from the digital experimentations as I like the composition and aesthetic quality that the triangles give to the image. To me this image gives the feeling of hopelessness in having a lot to deal with, "having a lot on your plate" so to speak.

Overall I do like this digital collage technique and would like to use it more in some of my future photography by planning out the entire image more in terms of the initial shot I want to take and what I will add over it. This has inspired me to try out more ways of creating collage type images digitally.