alternative normative

Having been an early member of a photographic archive in Beirut, Lebanon, I had access to a vast number of photographs, and a permission to re-purpose them. Even though I am a prolific photographer myself, I wanted to use portraits from the Anouchian studios in Tripoli, Lebanon from the 1950s to the 1970s for a slide show. I sought to move the images in the frame so that the eyes would all be in the same location as one image faded into the other. As I was progressing and while superimposing the images in Photoshop, I began to see combinations of images through transparency layers. Having finished the task of realigning the photos, I began to experiment with even more layering and compositing. The final results yielded fascinating new individuals and relationships between individuals, presenting an "alternative normative" reality, a sort of parallel world which defies expectations from everyday people. Most of the 85 images from this project rely on short captions to tell the story.