the sideways glance

another printed paper photo with posca pen drawings on top. i think there's something incredibly novel and underutilized about printer-paper photos as a lossy format. people always lean towards stuff like VHS artifacts, or cassette tape copies, or whatever, but i think this sort of format is also really appealing for nostalgia, at least for me.

i recently dug up photos my mom had printed many many years ago, when she used to photoshop jewellery onto photos of our pet dove at the time, who she loved a lot. it really tickled some sort of nostalgia or fondness in me. i think the way the dark values get super washed out and the colors get gritty and noisy really appeals to this sort of grunginess, a melancholy grunginess, which makes it feel more like an analogue to the way our memories are also lossy, capturing the general impact of a scene in less-than-perfect detail.

i am, of course, also a sucker for washed-out dark values and off-white light values. it just looks nice!