Artist Research
Idris Khan
Idris Khan is a London based artist who uses layering and digital manipulation to make his images.
Kahn photographs or scans from secondary source material, he then builds up the layers of scans digitally. This allows him to carefully control contrast, brightness and opacity. The use of multiple images which are very similar means he can build up the contrast in certain areas, either making them very dark or very light.
He usually uses images that are different but similar enough to be layered, for example, every page of the Qur'an or every Bernd and Hilla Becher spherical gasholder.
This image is of every page of the Qur'an layered on top of one another. I like this because it's a look into his culture but in a very subtle way. He has lined up every layer with extreme accuracy which makes it merge into a solid image
The repeated fold of the spine has shown up very black as it is repeated in a similar pattern on every page and when sorting the opacity, the image underneath shows through.
This is every image from the 'Bernd and Hiller Becher sperical gasholder' contact sheet, layered directly on top of one another. Bernd and Hiller Becher were known for photographing and documenting Germanys' dissapearing industrial architecture. Focusing on buildings with similar shapes and formations. This is the theme they were using when they photographed the gasholders.
The outcome is quite a soft edged sphere, you can see where the object has repetitions in formation because it appears darker than some other parts of the image.
I have researched this artist because his method is very similar to the method we used to create our images. We used our Flash-gun experiment photographs and layered up 2 or more images and made adjustments to the opacity levels to create a ghostly effect. These images were good for layering because of their black background and weird effects.