Bakersfield

One of the first digital mashup (or manipulated) images I ever did, dating from maybe 2000, when I was first starting to use a digital camera (I’d been using Photoshop for years, so I wasn’t a stranger to digital photography as such). I’ve always been fascinated by human bodies and landscapes (for me bodies are landscapes in ways I won’t explain here…), and it all came together for me around this time when I started playing with images like this in Photoshop. Within a year or two I’d started productively feeding an entire obsession….

Both images must have been taken on my old Kodak DC290, meaning the full size of the original images probably wasn’t much larger than the full size image you get here. The two images are pretty straightforward on their own — a friend of mine in my studio, blurred when the flash failed to fire, and a rather dull image of Bakersfield from somewhere on the Rosedale Highway.