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NEW REALITIES

Ruud van Empel

I actually completely stopped taking photos during the ’90s, because it didn’t interest me and it took too long, and that interest revived when the digital camera came. I was very happy when the computer came and Photoshop came. I remember when I saw it the first time, I was really amazed that I could do everything right there. I couldn’t sleep anymore, from that moment on.

I bought my computer in 1995 and started doing Photoshop. The first idea I had was that I wanted actually to make a picture completely like reality, but one that’s completely montaged. I wanted to control the image completely. I wanted to create my own people. I had so many ideas coming up of what I could do, suddenly.

What I do now is I make a sketch of the idea, basically, that’s just the simple idea. And I take all kinds of photos, and I’m not sure if I’m going to use them, but those things I never know at first. So I have a few ideas of what I want to do, and work with that, and start from there. But how it looks in details is something that arises during the process, when I’m making it. If there is a person in the image, I start with the face first. That’s the most important part, also the most difficult part. That could be like 100 or 200 layers, itself. The mouth, the lips—the mouth can be like 20 montages. So when that’s done, I make it one layer, and then I start on the body, and that could be also like 100 layers. When that’s finished, I start to do the background. Then, again, you have a few hundred layers. And sometimes it doesn’t work out. So I have to do a few different backgrounds or change the idea or change the whole composition. So sometimes I’m working for months, and I end up with no results. That’s possible. It happens. What I do, when it’s completely finished, the image, I put a grain all over it before it’s printed. So that brings everything together. I think because of the digital possibilities, you want to do different things. That goes for me, because you can create so many things. I wouldn’t be doing this, I think, with an analog technique. I can really make things realistic in the way I had imagined them to be. It’s inspiring.