This photograph is an experiment. Previous pictures in my Dreams and Visions series have been created by making double exposures on film in a camera. This can work very well, but there are three drawbacks:
- running 35mm film through the camera twice can lead to problems with frame registration;
- it is difficult to position the figure accurately against the background, which you can’t see, especially when you might be mixing landscape and portrait formats; and
- because the exposures of figures and backgrounds are usually made in different times and places it becomes difficult to achieve the best pairings.
These problems would be largely avoided using sheet film, but that’s not an option available to me.
I thought an answer would be to make the double exposures at printing stage. I prepared digital files of the figure (Hercules at Powis Castle) and the background (a textile from an art exhibition), in both cases making significantly lighter images than would be acceptable for individual prints, in particular lightening the darks/shadow areas because working with positives they will override the lights/highlights (the opposite of what happens when exposing negatives). I then printed the two images on top of each other. The resulting composite was scanned to give a digital file that I worked on in Lightroom. I’m not really satisfied with the result in this case, but I think it shows that the technique has potential.