Some background to the series of images that I am attaching. My parents are both holocaust survivors, my mother from Germany, my father from Hungary, who met in a refugee camp in Italy. They emigrated to Canada, where I was born. I always thought that my coming into being was the result of odd combination of chances, of survival, random meetings, voyages. In all my photographic work I allowed chance to play a part in the resulting images. In these images, the idea I'm working with are the propensity of humans to create symbols and attach meaning and affiliation to them, primarily the star-like patterns that represent a number of spiritual faiths. The resulting images, illustrate how similar the symbols of belief are with such slight differences in their structures. Like DNA, we are more alike than different.
The 10 attached images are from a larger series of images called "I See Stars". They are created by using a square image, cropped square from various sized photo images (35 mm., 6X6, and 4X5) that I have taken and then manipulated by a computer application that uses sections of the image displaced vertically, horizontally and by angle. There are over 3 trillion possible images that can result from a single photograph. The application can mirror the selected section into 20 sections. I use only 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 mirrored sections.
For each image that I have attached, there are accompanying images that use the same algorithm to produce images that are 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 sided stars. And with each photograph I use different sets of displacements to produce other sets of images. (if interested, more can be seen at alexneumann.art)
