Saturday, August 13, 2011

Concealment - Someonetohold


 For about 5 or so years much of my"serious" photography dealt with night time, with the theme of "Lifting the Veil of Night." The exploration of darkness and concealment began to include other tenets of concealment including a series called Trapped Spirits

Those images started from photographing found dolls, figurines and the like in antique and second hand stores. For the last year or so they've been laying dormant rolled up in the closet inked onto large Kinko paper and as pixels in a hard drive.  Lately I've returned to working on the Trapped Spirits, to which this image above seems to have no connection.

My good friend/artist/ex-husband encouraged me to return to them, to dive deeper into the idea of  their "concealment" which is what drew me to them in the first place, but only documenting them as they appeared.

Over the last few weeks, late at night, I bring them out and we play the game of seeking what they are hiding/concealing.  So, why am I talking about Trapped Spirits and showing a photograph that seems to have nothing to do with that?

Well, what I've been noticing since exploring how concealment operates,  is that it's has taken on farther reaching aspects than I originally noticed. 

The photograph above was shot in LA when the movie sheet on the kiosk was just out. I only recently came across it again while looking for something else. (which is usually the case considering my less than organized filing system...)

Anyway, tonight  I removed the title,  leaving only the tag line...."how do you hold on to someone you've never met?"  Putting those those words in various combinations and visual placements, juxtaposed with the partially hidden figure, created a completely new concept.

The image came into it's own form where the theme of concealment revealed a new aspect of  how it manifests. ..a new step for intuitively bringing to light that which is hidden,  sometimes operating on many subtle levels.







Photographs © Ellen Giamportone All rights reserved.