Tag Archives: photoshop for healing

Altered Horizons 24

Altered Horizons 24 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops a uselss non-functioning fan into a sun in a fabricated landscape as she recovers from side effects of her COVID booster.

The day after I got my COVID booster I could barely move. There was no way I would be able to do anything useful. Feeling old and sore and exhausted, I hung about the house hoping no one would find me in my embarrassingly lifeless state.

At Cornell’s Hydroplant, days before, I’d photographed this old fan. It was standing still in the middle of the churning, pulsing, loud busy-ness of the place. Everything around it seemed shiny and polished. But dust and debris clogged the fan’s blades; it looked like it had been sitting there useless for decades, like it would never be able to function again. The ancient thing wasn’t performing, wasn’t contributing. It wasn’t even particularly beautiful. Why was it there?

Lovingly, in Photoshop, I turned it into a huge sun taking up all the sky.

 

 

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Altered Horizons 19

Altered Horizons 19 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, composes grief landscapes using Photoshop in her efforts to deal with depression and cope with loss.

On a rainy gray afternoon I rummaged through the house to photograph things that reflected light, things that absorbed light, things with grit, and grooves, and threads, and pronounced textures. It happened to be one of my “bad” days. You know what I mean, one of those colorless days when nothing, not even chocolate cake, can calm the deep aching of a shredded heart.

Tossing together all the holey, groovy, scratchy images in Photoshop, I composed my grief landscape. My sun is a tea strainer I pasted onto a crystal saucer. The rainy sky is my bedroom carpet. The hill is the brim of a hat. And it’s all framed with the drainage strip that keeps floodwaters from entering my home.

 

 

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Altered Horizons 17

Altered Horizons 17 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops a fabricated landscape using old photos instead of newer shots of aged plants, and wonders why we can't appreciate the beauty in aging.

At the beginning of summer I photographed fresh hostas and dahlias in my garden, well before the ravages of time, heat, rabbits and slugs, too much rain, and not enough rain. Early September’s photo-shoot of the same patch of plants showed brown-tipped, yellowed and nibbled leaves with dusty spider webs between them. For my contrived landscape this week, I decided to go with the earlier photos. Transporting them to Photoshop, I crafted the young dahlia into a sun rising over a field of bright raindrop-splattered hostas.

Walking along a trail with friends recently, our conversation somehow turned from comparing favorite foods at Trader Joe’s to lamenting about our growing old. It seems many of us are now experiencing devastating loss of our former beautiful, strong, young and healthy selves. And it’s kinda sad how we view our aging faces and bodies as pathetically imperfect. Not particularly eager to display my current bespectacled, slightly wrinkled appearance, I, myself, have not updated my profile photo in years.

In Photoshop, I manipulated images of a favorite ancient scarf to frame this picture. Graceful aging, in some things like vintage clothing, is respected. Valued, even.

There are no great mysteries to sort out in this fabricated landscape. Except, maybe, why I chose to use July’s photos of the greener, fresher plants instead of the dusty, more interesting, older ones I’d just shot. Why is it we can’t appreciate the natural maturing of living things as they approach the ends of their lifetimes?

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Altered Horizons 16

Altered Horizons 16 Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, Photoshops fabricated landscapes in her dealing with depression and coping with loss.

We used to dance. When she was very young I’d swing my daughter around under the moon on a sandy beach. On a crowded dance floor, or in the living room, I sang as we twirled together. Now, my soothing nightly grief ritual: humming the old tunes to the ghost of my daughter. One of the songs always brings up images of blithe spirits waltzing around the moon.

Here my moon is really the rock that holds a bug screen down over my garden. Wilted lettuce plants are the dancers. A wave of foamy residue left on the shore by the receding tide becomes my horizon line. The whole scene is framed with the drainage strip that lies beneath my front door, spliced and inverted in Photoshop.

Walt Whitman, in his “Songs of Myself” from Leaves of Grass, wrote, “If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.” There, where my feet tread, is where I mainly focus the camera.

 

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