Tech/E-Project/Joined At The Hip

"They're all fabricated people. They're all different combinations of me and my wife," says New York City fine-art photographer Jake Rowland, when asked about his most recent series of photographic portraits. Shooting the original images of himself and his wife on medium-format film and then scanning them with a negative scanner, Rowland then works on manipulating each image in Photoshop to create a single "fabricated" portrait. "They're really not technically that sophisticated," Rowland says, although the work was provocative enough for Art + Commerce's Festival of Emerging Photographers, which ran last month in Brooklyn, New York.

"The way I look at it is that it's just like collage. It's not like morphing software. I'm just cutting pieces of one picture and putting it on to another. But the reason I got into [this process] is that working with images in a computer makes the photographs so malleable. And collage has always been one of my favorite techniques. The great thing about digital software is that you can create a seamless collage," says Rowland.

To shoot the source images for these pieced- together portraits, Rowland used an old Mamiya RB67 medium-format camera, opting for the time being to shoot film, instead of digital. "I would love to be shooting with a digital back. However, the price, even to rent one (much less to buy one), is prohibitive." Another reason he opted for working in film is that this series of nine images would be printed at 30 x 40 inches each. At that scale, he wanted to be certain to keep the high resolution that a fine-art venue like the Festival demands.

Rowland says his work evolved from previous works in which he used similar methods as well as similar themes. He mentions that some of his past project fused various members of his nuclear family: mother and daughter, uncle and aunt, himself and his father. But in this new series, he decided to focus on just two subjects, himself and his wife, and create variations on a theme?or perhaps mutations on a theme. "I named them the River Rock Variations because that's where we first met. They started out being about how you sort of lose yourself in a relationship. My wife was complaining that she was losing her identity. And then I just started making more and more of them. The possibilities of meanings just seem endless."

For the viewer as well, the possibilities of meanings start to unfold once you understand that you're looking at a composite image and that the image is very much a constructed one, not a "decisive moment" snapshot. In fact, there is a sense that the artist is not only humorously combining portraits to blur gender boundaries, but that he's also blurring the lines between processes (painting and photography) and even esthetics or artistic styles (realism and conceptualism).

The new work caught the eye of Charlotte Cotton, who is in charge of cultural programs at the high-end photo agency Art+Commerce and who is a former director for photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She is one of the main organizers of the Art+Commerce's Festival of Emerging Photographers, although she says the show is a competition, and that she's doesn't handpick any one photographer.

"What struck me," says Cotton about the new work, "is that it's still relatively rare when you see an artist who is using digital technology to do something that is subtle, but to also have [the concept of] digital entirely ingrained in the thinking process behind the work." For Cotton, Rowland's work does just that. "What Jake is doing is to make the notion of digital inextricable from the idea of the work. On top of that, I think it's incredibly difficult to do without creating something that's freakish or too novel. I also like his restraint. I think he is a fantastic editor, coming away with just a few images through a lot of digital experimentation. It shows that he not only has an idea, but has that real artistic confidence to know when he's done it and when it doesn't quite work." All in all, this process of investigation and discovery?or, more to the point, cutting and pasting?took Rowland about four months, in which time he completed the series of nine photographs.

He's the type of artist, Cotton feels, who has not just learned to manipulate photos, but has truly investigated the language of photography. "Jake strikes me as one of the leaders in this festival because he's very clear and very articulate about his work," says Cotton.

"For that show," Rowland says, "The heads were huge. When they're big like that you can get into an insane amount of detail, which heightens the illusion. And even that big, you still can't see the seams. No matter how hard you look."



All nine images are for sale, and inquiries can be made through his Web site, <www.jakerowland.com>.