This was the most difficult of all the 12 photos to shoot.
It’s held together behind the scenes with safety pins, cotton thread and cocktail sticks and I had to suspend it in my bedroom window to get the light how I wanted it. It took many failed attempts to get it all balanced and I had to take the shot quickly as the model collapsed shortly afterwards.
No doubt someone can tell me how I could have done it all by manipulating a simpler image on my laptop with photoshop or somesuch but I don’t have those skills and also, it’s important to me that things are real.
I wonder why this is the case, after all this is a photograph – already removed from the physical thing it depicts and whilst, in the past I might have been able to hold the negative in my hand which at least had some physical relationship to the original object (the photons reflected from the object being photgraphed will have interacted with the film in my hands) this image only exists as a series of 1’s and 0’s on my laptop’s hardrive. Would it make a difference if someone had cleverly manipulated an image so that it looked exactly the same as the real thing that took so much frustrating trial and error to construct? I suppose the answer to that question depends on how important you feel the relationship between the process of creation and the final piece of work is.
To my mind the significance of the final image (photograph, painting, sculpture or whatever) is not just the thing in itself but the story of creation that it embodies. Furthermore, I have a hunch that this resonates strongly with one of the important things about being human, an idea I hope to explore in the future…
I ask for wonder 
Like the image and the thinking around it. I guess the question of the creative process would have toi take into account the fact that any digital process to create the image would in itself still be one of creativity, and as such the image would still be ‘real’…
Yes, I think that’s true. I suppose I’m curious as to why i would feel differently about an image that had been created digitally to one that has its roots in something more concrete. So, for example, an action sequence or stunning piece of scenery in a film doesn’t seem quite so satisfying to me if it was created using CGI as opposed to it being ‘real’.I think that there is something about being human that it’s important to be embodied (interesting article in this weeks New Scientist about how our intelligence is embodied througout our physical being and not all in the brain). The more we interact with the world through technology the more we move ourselves further and further away from that embodiment and so I wonder what that does to our humanity. On the otherhand (and to counteract any accusations of me being a luddite!) we could see the technology as an extension of our embodiment…