Photoshop with a purpose

One of the main motives for this return trip to the Omo is to show the tribes the photo illustrations I’ve created of their myths and archetypal personal dreams. On my first trip six years ago, the elders, shamans, chiefs and storytellers gave me detailed descriptions from which I created these photo illustrations. These visualizations have been shown in galleries throughout the United States, including at the United Nations headquarters and a current exhibit at the Longview Museum of Fine Art, in Longview, Texas. Now it’s time to show the tribes.

Often people ask how the images are created. Technically speaking, my main brush is Photoshop CS2 on a Mac Quad G5. Since I work in 16 bit and sometimes have more than 50 layers, the paint bucket of bits gets a bit heavy. File sizes are often two to six Gigabytes (that’s with a G). Early on when Photoshop wouldn’t let me save my large files, quickly I learned that Photoshop has a 2GB limit on PSD files. Larger files must be saved in PSB (as in Photoshop Big) format.

But before the painting can begin, I gathered the raw material in remote African villages. After interviewing the elders about their myths and dreams, I spent days visualizing and photographing components for the Illustrations. For example, for the Konso Red Cattle Dream image, I knew that I wanted a photo of an elder sleeping. So I asked the elders. Now this is the equivalent of me asking a US state senator to allow me to photograph him at home sleeping. The elders nervously laughed. No one had ever asked them this before. Sheepishly one volunteered to pose. We went to his house with the entire village following to watch.

You can see the photo I selected to use in the illustration.

But I also needed cattle and people harvesting a crop. According to the elders, when they dreamed red cattle, they knew they would have a bountiful harvest. With no WalMart down the street, a good harvest separated life from death for these people. (Just as a foot note, since the Konso live in the birthplace of Modern Man, where else in the history of mankind do we encounter cattle dreams predicting the outcome of harvests?)

This cattle-dream image is relatively simple. To the sleeping-elder base photo I added layers containing a field of crops, the cattle, women harvesting, a few almost-hidden images and a touch of texture. All the layers allowed me to continuously move components and change adjustment layers as the creative spirit moved.

Now I hope that the Konso elders, especially the sleeping one, like the image. If they make suggestions, I can just go to the layers and make the appropriate adjustments.