Artist – Craftsman

 

This is a series of photographs exploring the meaning of digital identity, and how that identity increasingly shapes our perception of individuals today.

In nearly all popular online forums for communication, users have the ability to select avatars, or pictures to represent themselves in dialog. Often the images that people choose are not pictures of themselves; rather, they serve as signifiers for some aspect of their persona they would like to highlight.

As these venues for communication become more popular and greater amounts of time are spent communicating virtually, rather than in real life, the avatars individuals choose begin to distort the image that comes into our head when we think about those individuals.

Each pictures is created by combining an individual’s AOL Instant Messenger avatar, their Facebook avatar, and a portrait that I have taken of that person. I chose to combine the images with High Dynamic Range processing, a tool typically used with individual images “[to] enable photographers to record a greater range of tonal detail than a given camera could capture in a single photo” (www.cambridgeincolor.com). Instead of working on a single photo, I input the three source images into the algorithm, which created the final composite pictures.