I wrote the following as a metafilter comment about the horror photography Joshua Hoffine.
I think it was Picasso who said “art is the lie, which tells the truth” These pictures are the truth that sounds like lies. See that’s the thing about art. There’s lossy compression involved. That’s where the skill of the artist comes in, dealing with that lossy compression.
Photos don’t have sounds or movement, or smells. Most of our senses are telling our brain the same message: nothing has changed from a moment ago when we read that dinosaur thread. Our vision is meekly saying “oh…it seems a silhouette of a girl might be treading into a basement where a goblin faced man is under the stairs. Also, you have a new IM”
In one of the Hoffine photos, a wolf is attacking a poor naked girl…but wait! There’s a man’s arm! Oh, I guess he’s a werewolf. Right. Ho-Hum.
Why is this boring? This should be triggering all of our fear reflexes! A young girl about to be eaten by an animal. And not a normal animal but an animal that isn’t like any animal we have experienced!
The same reason watching a video of a roller coaster from the ground is boring. Sure you can empathize about how scared the riders (or naked girl) might be, but a large part of feeling fear is the adreniline boost that occurs when you cannot predict your surroundings. Our empathy with regards to fear is limited because fear can throw several switches in our brain that we cannot.
So, how do you, as an artist, do it? How do you deal with the limited sensory compression in a photograph. How do you unnerve people when you are handicapped by only being able to use a fraction of one sense? When no matter what is in that image you will have at least 4 senses working against your prediction of danger?
J.K Potter deals with the fact that she can’t break the rules of your surroundings by breaking the rules that she can. Compare Hoffine’s half-human/half-animal with this one by J.K. Potter.
Potter’s was probably done with an enlarger and traditional retouching tools. If you look (not even too) closely at the top blending line, it seems to be a simple fade. I feel like the light might be inconsistent between the two images that are blended and it’s a duotone photo — something that you would only see if you were a strange form of color blind. Altogether, it’s much less realistic than the Hoffine wolf photo, which is: in color, has realistic effects, not much obvious retouching. Yet I, and I imagine others, would find the Potter photo much creepier.
I think it’s because of the way nature and her lack of options forced her hand. If you asked a creative person to design a guy with a fish head, the results would probably look cartoony. necks would morph into other necks. There would be clear divisions at the edges of body parts you could name, or a dispertion of fishyness over the form of a human. But because Potter couldn’t really distort the form of either one, she had to put it in an unconventional place, with impossible physiology.
In essense, she’s saying “keep your office smells and sounds, but I’ll break the laws of nature in mine and that will make you feel threatened.”