Memorial to George Floyd
This video, dedicated to the memory of George Floyd, wasn’t planned. It wasn’t even supposed to be a video. It began as a simple color photo I took during a ‘fashion photo shoot’ with @lesliegelber a few weeks ago. That color photo takes up only the first 2 seconds of this memorial.
The garment that @lesliegelber created and is wearing in this video, “About Faces”, was carefully pieced from multiple T-Shirts and is deliberately ambiguous. The addition of the face mask she is wearing, by @lance.v.moore, sets a contemporary theme.
Combined with a huge rusted metal door as background, I felt that our ‘photo shoot’ had captured a great “look”, and I was very happy with the resulting photograph. We were good to go!
But then the world changed, what was “good to go” no longer felt right. So that picture stayed in the camera.
After a few days it occurred to me that I could flip the image so that it was starkly black and white, which was more in line with how Leslie and I felt after Mr. Floyd’s murder. I decided to bleed the color original into a black and white image. That was when 2 still photo images became a video.
After more thought, and looking closely at the “Face” Leslie created by merging male and female images, I decided to extend the video, panning into and enlarging that aspect of the garment.
The first time I watched the camera zoom into that “face” the rest became obvious. It was then just a question of finding the image of George Floyd by Houston-based artist Anat Ronen, and making a few modifications so that it sync’d into the video. And I thought finally now I was OK to go.
But not quite. I realized it would be disrespectful to George Floyd and Anat Ronen if I didn’t also include her original, beautiful portrait. So I added on both the picture she posted from her studio, and the final portrait itself.
There’s a lot going on now, I hope it’s just a beginning. We are all affected, in my case by getting motivated to create an ‘accidental’ memorial.
Which maybe really isn’t accidental.
Find Anat Ronen at www.anatronen.com and @anatronen1971
