Last night, C and I went to an art opening for an acquaintance, Jeff Klapperich, and it was lovely.
I don't know even know how to properly explain what Jeff does because his process is so detailed. Many people, at first glance, believe that his work is done digitally, but it's not. This is purely a photographic process using multiple exposures that reach into numbers that cause most professional photographers to drop their jaws a bit (or at least, the photographers that were at the opening last night). There is also no human exposure in the image. The illusion is created using a sort of layered stenciling process and a camera modification that only jeff could explain...and probably not to a photographic layman like myself. The backgrounds are pieces of art in their own right that are meticulously assembled from various objects to work with the stencils and convey the idea in the final piece.
In person, at a large scale, these pieces are just beautiful. I don't know if the full effect can be seen online in a smaller format, but I want to share them anyway. Here are a few of my personal favorites.
Sleep
The Prognosticator
The Strategist
6 comments:
Sounds amazingly complex. I bet they're stunning in full size. Did he say how long they take to do? I'm trying to figure out how he might have done them.
Amazing; they look very sophisticated and complex. Hope that you have been doing better and this year is better than last.
Your blog friend,
/ph
My understanding is that it takes him weeks to put one together, but how many hours that equates to, I don't know. I would imagine it varies per image.
Yesterday, he displayed some of the assemblages, stencils, and negatives to try to explain his process. My understanding is that he starts out with a polaroid of a person from which he hand draws the stencils. I don't fully understand photography, but someone explained to me that the varying stencils are used to bring out the highlights, midtones, and darker areas of the image (kind of like the way that a grayscale mask works in Photoshop) and it's the way that he can create images with so many exposures without losing all clarity. So basically, it's one stencil per exposure...but I can't explain it any better than that, because quite frankly, the concept fries my brain a little bit.
Getting the stencils and the assemblage to work together is a long process. I think he goes through rolls of film and tweaks things until it's exactly the way that he wants it.
The final image is just multiple exposures on one negative.
That's very cool. Thank you for sharing these! I'm going to go check out his other work...
Those are awesome!
w.o.w!
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