Digital Art: puzzle of photos
Digital artist Riccardo Paci developed the “puzzle of photos” technique which he used to make his Eyes and Sguardi su Lipari works. These works are compositions of digital photographs of nature - flowers, leaves, bark, trees, plants, etc - and digital photographs of Eolie Islands, cut out specially to build a given subject. The works in the Eyes series and in Sguardi su Lipari series are Lambda prints on glossy paper and have the following features:
- The puzzle of photos contains photographs of various sizes overlapping with each other.
- All the photographs in the puzzle of photos have been taken especially by Riccardo Paci.
- The puzzle of photos do not repeat the same part of the photograph more than once.
- No changes have been made to the colour, brightness, etc. of the photos contained in the puzzle of photos.
- The program for creating puzzle of photos has been developed by Riccardo Paci... and it is constantly being updated.
Discover the secrets of the "puzzle of photos"
Web applications:
Puzzle Photo Viewer: to enlarge each original photo used to compose Sguardo su Lipari 4.
Puzzle of photos details analiser: to discover all the details of Sguardo su Lipari 3.
Video animation: to observe the creation of Sguardo su Lipari 1.
Where did the idea of the “puzzle of photos” stem from?
In 2004, after seeing a “photomosaic” at a photographer’s in the centre of Florence, Riccardo Paci started to browse the web looking for appropriate software to make one. Since he could not find any he tried to develop one himself. About a month later the first results began to appear. His first attempts clearly showed some weaknesses: the visual effect from a distance was interesting but, if looked at from closer, the pictures used to make the mosaic were too small to be seen and convey a meaning.
He thus decided to make puzzles by using bigger, juxtaposed pictures and one year later he achieved what he called a “puzzle of photos”. In the meantime photomosaics started to spread on the Internet, including what became the most famous one showing President Bush’s face made with the pictures of American soldiers who died in Iraq. Even software to create photomosaics became more and more common and now there are about ten on the market, some of which are free. However, none of them can be used to create “puzzles of photos”.
In order to create the “puzzles of photos", Riccardo Paci devoted himself to the creation of a “palette of pictures ” made of different shots including the widest possible range of colours. He then focused himself on taking ad hoc pictures of a given subject matter (e.g: “Leaves”, “Flowers”, “Fruit” etc) by following the blooming of forsythias, sunflowers, brooms and mimosas to create a range of different yellows; geraniums, poppies, pomegranates to create a range of different reds and so on. The combination of his vast photo archive and the increasingly higher quality of his software led to the creation of works for the Eyes subject matter.