garden cat and abu ghraib in 3-d!

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I’ve writ­ten about our cat Scooter. A while back I’d bought myself a Sput­nik cam­era, and old Russ­ian roll-film cam­era that takes two pic­tures simul­ta­ne­ously, each of them of the same thing, but with sep­a­rate lenses spaced about the same dis­tance as a pair of eyes. With a spe­cial stereo viewer or by mak­ing what’s called an anaglyph you can recon­struct the scene giv­ing you a 3-d effect. When I took the cam­era out­side on the first day I had it Scooter fol­lowed me out.

Above and below are a cou­ple anaglyphs made from images shot dur­ing that ses­sion. If you have a pair of red/cyan 3-d glasses you can see the image in stereo. (A red/greed pair will work as well, though not as well. Clear glasses that use polar­ized light won’t work for teas­ing apart the sep­a­rate images in the anaglyph.) I con­structed the anaglyphs in a way that would still make sense to view­ers with­out the 3-d glasses, in a way that fea­tures the star of each picture…

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As much fun as I had out­side with the cat I hadn’t bought the cam­era to take more won­der­ful cat pic­tures. George Bush’s Iraq War was chug­ging along full steam and the noto­ri­ous pic­tures from Abu Ghraib had recently sur­faced. The world was pissed after see­ing them and so was I. Pol­i­tics seeps into my art in var­i­ous ways, most of them sub­tle, but I started a small seri­ous of pieces address­ing the Iraq war. Below is one of those works, a 3-d pho­tomon­tage com­bin­ing staged ele­ments along with one of the most infa­mous war images of recent times. It’s a com­plex response, com­bin­ing what might look like humor with a seething rage I still har­bor towards a war launched by a man who’s now been respon­si­ble for more Amer­i­can deaths than the num­ber of those who died in the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks in New York. And that’s only a frac­tion of those who’ve been killed.

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James SOE NYUN: Le Can-Can Abu Ghraib.

Tech­ni­cal Details: The orig­i­nal Abu Ghraib image was gen­tly dis­sected and reassem­bled into two slightly dif­fer­ent images that were then com­pos­ited to give a sub­tle 3-d image. The fore­ground and stage were mock­ups that I staged and pho­tographed twice with con­ven­tional cam­eras, mov­ing the tri­pod to the side about four inches between expo­sures. The “danc­ing” fig­ures were pho­tographed using the stereo Sput­nik cam­era. Two sep­a­rate com­pos­ite images were com­pleted using Pho­to­shop, one reflect­ing what the left eye might see, the other what the right eye would see. The left image was then pasted into the red chan­nels of the final image and the right image pasted into the green and blue chan­nels. The final work is printed fairly large, at a scale approach­ing nar­ra­tive his­tory paintings.

Google “pho­to­shop” and “anaglyph” for a pile of resources on how to make your own anaglyphs.


March 29 2008 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: • • • • • | 2 Comments »