Destroy Self Portrait

Destroy Portrait Exercise

After viewing and discussing 'Destroy Rankin' photography in class we were asked to attempt this ourselves.  To complete this exercise, I felt is was necessary to take a reasonable portrait of myself.  I made the effort to wear make-up and posed for the portrait in order for the printed photograph to feel 'wrong' to destroy.

The original image

f.4.8 1/25s ISO-640 60mm

The following image is the manually destroyed photograph.  This was printed at a local shop, sized 10"x8” in order for it to be effectively manipulated.  I thought about how to do this and decided that actually letting my learning disabled, autistic son destroy it and by doing so give away control of the finished result was the best method.  My son was reluctant to do at first but once he started the task, he found it hilarious and didn't want to stop.  I actually think my son's efforts are far better than my digitally destroyed version. The destroyed photograph has been re-photographed by myself using my digital camera in order to create a digital version for uploading to my blog.

Manually Destroyed Version

The following photograph is the digitally destroyed version that I created using Photoshop.  This was achieved by importing the original file into Photoshop then using the Marquee tools to select different areas of the image and copying the selections to a new canvas per selection. These new images then need to be re-sized by using Image/Image size and reducing the resolution and document size. In order to create the montage, a new and blank canvas is then created ready to copy the re-sized selections.

Digitally destroyed version (boring by my son's standard)

My Evaluation
This exercise actually turned out to a lot more 'fun' than I expected it to be. I was very satisfied with my decision to encourage my son to destroy the printed photograph rather than attempting to alter it myself.  I also think that letting my son 'do the damage', was closer to Rankin's original idea because he didn't directly destroy his images either.  The digitally destroyed version was a good exercise using Photoshop but nowhere near as creatively expressive as the manually destroyed image.