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By the Light of a Silvery Moon

I've searched out matching pairs of picture postcards, based on the same original daytime photograph, where one has been left unadulterated and the other heavily worked. Here an unknown retoucher has created their own particular, often garish and sometimes peculiar vision of a nocturnal scene. Windows glow, street lamps are set ablaze, festoons appear, shadows vanish and almost always a silvery moon is added to the sky.

Continue looking and stranger things begin to reveal themselves. Although many of the people & vehicles appear in both images, some have disappeared. Sometimes epic in scale - a whole beach of sun bathers are flooded over by a night time high tide, and sometimes more subtle - one couple on a lawn vanish, while another nearby are left in place. Changes strangely evocative of the doctored photographs of Stalinist Russia.

This series has two distinct outcomes; photo-collage and animated/lenticular works.

Collage

The collaged pieces are made from two original postcards, cut by hand or laser and the cutout pieces inlaid into the other view (and visa-versa).

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Layered & illuminated

The newest iteration of this project I've produced some layered & illuminated pieces. Here holes are cut in an original postcard with a daytime view and this is positioned above a reproduction of a night time view. The latter housed within a hidden recess and lit by LED strips hidden in the gap between the two. I'm currently working with my framer to finesse the design of these objects and will add some images as soon as we've got something to photograph. 

Animation

In the animated versions of the work, the view flips between the day and night scenes, shown in their entirety. I've produced these animations in a number of formats; double layered prints, lenticular prints and screen based animations.

This is a caption

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Window installation on Bury Place, London WC2

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