Beatrice Dalle (1993)

Now this is where the REAL fun started. Before this template, I was limited to originals that fulfilled two important  prerequisites. They had to be black and white (or no more than one colour) and they had to have sharp contrasts. This meant in effect: they had to be printed. So I could only re-use stuff that had already been put into print by someone else. This was a limitation that I had to overcome, otherwise this way of producing images would soon become a dead end.

What I tried here was to take a picture from the TV screen and use this as an original. If I could make this work, the pool of material available to me would be considerably bigger than it had been before.

This was in 1993, well before the advent of affordable digital photography and DVDs. So the olde VCR had to do a lot of fast-forwarding and rewinding to get to the right frame. And I needed a tripod. But that was all.

Somehow I tried to do all this as lo-tec as possible. The idea was NOT to print an image on a piece of cardboard. I could have done this in a good copy shop. The idea was to dig into the ocean of images, come up with something and NAIL IT DOWN so it could not get away anymore like all the other images. I think this nailing-down part needed to be crude and painful and, well, lo-tec like a hammer. Whatever.

So this was my first template that I did from a photo. I still had to learn that to make this work I had to do some abstraction that previously the printing process had done for me.

All in all, I think it came out well.

Beatrice Dalle: Template

Beatrice Dalle: 50 x 70