Negative Exchange Response

For the first part of our very first project in class, we exchanged negatives with a partner and without seeing what our partner did to their negative, or what they were doing with our negative, we interpreted the image in our own ways.
I think the whole class came up with some very interesting images. It was great to see all of the creative processes that people used to make an image that was originally someone else's their own.
Having created images that varied very differently from my partner's - Jamie - I would actually like to talk about two images that didn't vary quite as much as some others in class, and they would be Kathleen's original print and Grace's interpretation of it.
Even though both photographs were pretty much the same size, and there weren't any sort of alternative processes used in making the prints, it was quite striking how different the images read. And it was all due to a couple minor changes, like the contrast of the the photo, and then also the type of border that each person included in their final photograph. Grace's interpretation had a much higher contrast level than Kathleen's original which even just that created in both images very different moods and environments. The figures in Kathleen's seemed much softer and calmer and there was this sense of hope in the expressions of the girls faces. But in Grace's image, the harshness of the darker blacks gave the photograph this edge to it and really gave it almost a condescending undertone... I don't know if that is quite the right word to describe what I mean, but in Grace's photograph, when looking at it, I almost felt that the girls were staring at me from their place in their photo in almost a judgmental way, whereas in Kathleen's I more felt like I was sitting there in the bushes with the two sisters sharing that moment with them.