sharing images in new ways

Do you ever get the urge to do something different? I’m not talking about dramatic life or career changes, here. Just changes that shake up your routine, change your way of seeing, or result in new work that feels fresh.

One of the ways I’m addressing that urge right now is by playing around with paired images: diptychs, triptychs and short, visual stories of five to eight images. It’s sort of like writing haiku when you’re used to writing novels, so it requires a different way of thinking. It's fun looking for relationships between images that not only hold them together, but also result in a sum that is greater than its parts—images that tell not only their own stories, but also help shed light on each other; images that, perhaps, feel more poetic when paired.

Here is a diptych from Great Cranberry Island. The boulder was shaped by the ocean's waves and, in addition to their physical relationship, I loved the waves of blue in the rock.

What about you? Do you ever pair images to create a diptych or triptych? Printing a number of individual images first is a great way to play with pairings, as it allows you to shuffle them around on a table. It can be done on the computer screen, too, but for some reason, it’s just not the same. Why not give it a try and see what happens?