A Distant Sadness
Battlefield 3 - 2013
A Distant Sadness is an in game photography / video game photography project that was completed in 2013. The aim was to use a popular medium (a video game) and produce photographs that would display a visually haunting and powerful look at modern day war. The project is likened to Robert Capa’s World War II work.
I arrived at the idea of this project while looking at old world war two photographs and coincidentally listening to Bear McCreary’s Battlestar Galactica score “Gaeta’s Lament”. I was disturbed and deeply moved by the moment – how this combination of music and colorless photographs could define war in such a eloquently unsettling fashion. Inspired by this experience, I researched how I could achieve these visuals; I soon realized that Battlefield 3 and a mobile phone technique (later coined “screen photography”) could produce exactly what I was going for.
The “technique” that was used during this series is similar to a technique used in Art Photography; where you basically take a photograph of an art piece or another photograph and in turn, create one singular photograph (not the same as double exposure). It was originally introduced to in-game photography by a fine gentleman and friend, James Pollock (The Virtual Geographic).
Within the confines of A Distant Sadness, this technique was done by first playing the game and capturing the “overall” scene within the confines of the display resolution. After this, an iPhone 4 was used to capture the specific scene that I had been envisioning. Lastly the PicsArt app was utilized to add the black and white filter within all the images displayed.
Joshua Taylor, March 2015
All photographs taken by Joshua Taylor.
Content within photographs property of Digital Illusions CE.
A Distant Sadness was featured on VideoGameTourism.
Battlefield 3 - 2013
A Distant Sadness is an in game photography / video game photography project that was completed in 2013. The aim was to use a popular medium (a video game) and produce photographs that would display a visually haunting and powerful look at modern day war. The project is likened to Robert Capa’s World War II work.
I arrived at the idea of this project while looking at old world war two photographs and coincidentally listening to Bear McCreary’s Battlestar Galactica score “Gaeta’s Lament”. I was disturbed and deeply moved by the moment – how this combination of music and colorless photographs could define war in such a eloquently unsettling fashion. Inspired by this experience, I researched how I could achieve these visuals; I soon realized that Battlefield 3 and a mobile phone technique (later coined “screen photography”) could produce exactly what I was going for.
The “technique” that was used during this series is similar to a technique used in Art Photography; where you basically take a photograph of an art piece or another photograph and in turn, create one singular photograph (not the same as double exposure). It was originally introduced to in-game photography by a fine gentleman and friend, James Pollock (The Virtual Geographic).
Within the confines of A Distant Sadness, this technique was done by first playing the game and capturing the “overall” scene within the confines of the display resolution. After this, an iPhone 4 was used to capture the specific scene that I had been envisioning. Lastly the PicsArt app was utilized to add the black and white filter within all the images displayed.
Joshua Taylor, March 2015
All photographs taken by Joshua Taylor.
Content within photographs property of Digital Illusions CE.
A Distant Sadness was featured on VideoGameTourism.
