WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND IS WHAT WE WILL BECOME

What We Leave Behind Is What We Will Become

Johnny Joo

Johnny Joo's pictures are mostly of abandoned sites and the interior of abandoned building. I really like the scary feeling you get when you look at Joo's images, they all have a very eerie feel and I think that makes the pictures so valuable and compelling. I also like the rich but realistic colours in Joo's photographs and the style of framing that always cuts a corner off the subject and sees things from a different angle. His work suggests the idea that again we are moving on in this world and that through develops in our society building and places are left behind. However, they maybe left behind but are still standing as evidence of past memories.

Picture 1


Picture 2

Picture 3
Contact Sheet





The photograph of the bridge was also quite challenging, the location was key to the structure and dynamics of the picture. The closest I could find to copy the original was to use the bridge you can now see, I used Photoshop a lot to make it look as similar to the original as possible. In Photoshop I changed the brightness, contrast, lightness, saturation, hue to give it that dark purple and dark green feel, to do this I had to do two lays, one with a purple hue and another with a green hue. Then I used some transformation tools, firstly I used distort to bend the bridge down to the left down corner of the photograph and then I used perspective to make it have a big curved shape to it but still making the photograph look realistic and non-edited. I didn't this editing process with two pictures and 'close edit' looked very Photoshoped and wasn't that similar so I had a easy decision to choose 'close2 edit'.

The contact sheet is quite big for this picture because I have to re-shoot it. The first time I didn't take the shots from the right angle, I was taking it from the front of the building, what I needed to do was take it from the side of the building, like the original. Once I had re-shot I found that it looked much better and quite similar to the original. A lot of the photographs weren't framed nicely so I didn't pick them, some had branches in front of the camera obstructing the view of the building and some were of the other side of the building which was similar at all. I had quite a few photographs to choose from and after doing some basic editing on them decided that 'close5' was the closest. There's a number of factors which made it the closest, it was perfectly head on, the open space in the foreground of the picture, the darkness and colour is good and vivid.