Idris Khan

Idris Khan

Idris Khan is an artist who was born in Birmingham in 1978, and is at the moment based in London. He's done an amazing array of work composing digitally animated photos with many photos on top of each other, giving a ghostly image like the one above. For example on one occasion he did every William Turner postcard from the Tate Britain all on top of one another, and on another took photographs of every page of Roland Barthes's mediation on photography and put them all together as done below.

I find it intriguing as a whole. To see so much and yet so little all at once, because it's pages and pages worth of information all jammed in together, I think gives an extraordinary effect. It's quite ghostly, capturing the essence of all these different layers hidden beneath the surface, because essentially that's what a book is. If you think about it logically, all the pages are pressed together, and it's only the fact that the pages are opaque that mean you can only take in so much information at a time, but with what Khan's done here, he's shown the hidden depths behind it, the layers you don't see, and it's incredible to see the form of ghostly photographs, and illegible words in intangible rows.

Experiment 1

As an experiment, I decided to take numerous photographs of someone brushing their teeth and layer them all on top of the other and rub through on photoshop, digitally manipulating them in the style of Idris Khan.

I think it definately captures a ghostly essence that wouldn't have been there before. The black and white works well in showing the tones and shapes hidden beneath each layer, and the ghostly arm to the right as well as the bathroom environment shows what is occuring. To have made it more similar to Khan's style with the water towers, it might have been better to have less movement to show the real subtleties between arm gestures, but overall it works well in capturing the ghostly repetition of such a common act.

Photos used in the experiment:

Looking at Idris Khan's work, of impression beings left, of those pages all being one on top of the other, got me thinking about other layers that could exist, or rather things that are there that we are maybe not aware of, or maybe we notice but don't really think about on a deep level, about the things we leave behind really, the impressions, the physical and the emotional. So, in the middle of the night I decided to get up and record what things have been left behind in my house as evidence of people having been there as a set of photographs:

I love how these photos really work well as a set. The eeriness of the nighttime when everything's quiet and still is definately an atmosphere captured realistically in the set. For most of the photos I took them in the dark with a sharp flash light, to make the images sharper, although where there was already a source of light I kept the flash off to capture the natural light effects. I love the subtleties in some of them, like the food stains, and the more original photos which I probably would never have thought of if I had set them up in the style of Hopper and Crewdson, like the letter waiting on the door so the occupants would remember to post it the next day, and the lamp turned on ominously in the hallway. I really tried to think about composition while taking the photos, which I think works really well, particularly I think with the yoghurt packet in the fridge, with the sharp light in the background and the packet taking up all the available space, giving it a powerful essence. It was strange to see how different everything is at night which you don't really notice in your day-to-day lives. Everything seems to take on a darker edge, waiting for the day to come.