Negative Exchange Response

With the photo remake/negative exchange portion of the source to self project, I remade Charlie’s photo of a stormy beach while he remade my photo of a guy being a murderer. Some of the differences between my original photo and the remake that Charlie made of mine are very evident, but there are a lot of similar things as well. For example, my photograph was part of my “death series,” where I basically wanted to show a crazed murderer with blood smeared all over his clothes and weapon. When Charlie re-made my photo, he said that he wanted it to just be really scary and realistic, so he put a ken doll with a gun in front of my original photo, which he had smeared with a new mixture of “bloody goo” all over. The result was an almost too realistic photograph of a guy (ken doll) shooting his own brains out (which was supposed to be represented by my original photograph.) Although it was more realistic, it honestly captured what I was trying to portray in the original photograph from the start; a crazed killer. Also, with my original photo I had wanted to make it almost like a film strip, due to the number of photographs I had in the death series. Surprisingly enough, without even knowing my original intentions, Charlie said that he used the ken doll to make the photograph seem almost like a movie scene. One other factor that I thought was interesting between our photographs was that on my model, I used fake blood on the shirt to represent the “killer” aspect while in Charlie’s re-make, he used an entirely new mixture of food coloring, bacon fat and cornstarch to symbolize the “bloody goo.” Overall, with my original photograph, I wanted to simple invoke a sense of uneasiness within the viewer, which is exactly what Charlie wanted to do with his re-make. In the end, both photographs basically ended up portraying the same similar idea of “murder scene/crazy killer,” which I thought was really fun, since neither of us had any idea what the original photograph even looked like.