Abstract

The artwork One Breath, No. 1 is introduced. It is a photograph which has been created via a special process which involves the breath of the photographer as an essential component. This text describes the context in which the artwork arose, the topic it is concerned with, the visual design of its composition, and the techniques and stylistic devices which have been utilized. In addition, the background of the artist is summarized.

Keywords-photography, art, breath, altered states of consciousness

​

I. Topic and Technique of the Artwork

​

This photograph belongs to a cycle of works which is entitled One Breath. For this cycle the photographer kept the aperture of the camera open for the time it takes to take one breath while at the same time the camera was fixed in front of her chest. Thus, the breath is reflected in the structures of every single photograph. The images of the series have been taken directly from the camera in a nearly unprocessed form. The unknown, the unconscious, and the unplanned play an importand role in the works resulting from this process. The single works of this series evolved in different states of consciousness and are intentionally kept dreamlike and ambiguous. The selected image One Breath, No. 1 shows a scene with two figures in a German wood. Several visual primitives for images have been identified, which are able to evoke an aestetic appeal, i.e., intentionally applied film grain, subtle colorization, or the clarity of the spatial organization of the image components (see [1] for a survey of aesthetic primitives of images). For One Breath, No. 1 a number of them has been applied. For example, besides the filigree blurring structures evolving from the described breath technique, the choice of monochrome colors and the exploitation of the dynamic range should underline the dreamlike quality of the content.

​

II. The Artist

​

Gabriele Peters lives in Bochum, Germany. She studied Mathematics, minor Psychology, at Ruhr-University Bochum and received a doctors degree in 2002. She co-developed new photo panorama techniques at Caltech, Pasadena, and was Professor for Visual Computing at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Dortmund, before she took over the Human-Computer Interaction Chair at Figure 1. One Breath, No. 1. University of Hagen in 2010. Her photographic education she received at the Center of Art and Music at Ruhr University. She presented her works in numerous international exhibitions, e.g., at the Museum of Arts of Bochum or at Siggraph, Los Angeles. Furthermore, she serves as reviewer for photography competitions and festivals such as the Photography Festival Voies Off in Arles, France. Her artistic topics are alienation of reality and altered states of consciousness. In the autumn of 2017 One Breath, No. 1, along with some other images of this series, has been shown in an exhibition at the Kulturrat, a cultural center of Bochum.

​

References

​

[1] Peters, Gabriele: Criteria for the Creation of Aesthetic Images for Human-Computer Interfaces - A Survey for Computer Scientists. Int. J. of Creative Interfaces & Computer Graphics, Vol. 2 (1), pp. 68-98, 2011.