Bruce Jackson: Pictures from a Drawer

The cover image for Jackson's book, Pictures from a Drawer

This is the book’s cover illustration. It shows, in one image, everything I did and was trying to do with these images.

Most of the image has a dulling yellow patina, which obscures detail in both light and dark areas of her face and her clothing. The clear rectangle shows the results of some work I did on that image in Photoshop CS3. Mainly, I reduced (but didn’t remove entirely) the level of yellow and applied a bit of sharpening to what was left. I also shifted the greys and blacks a bit. With some of the other images I tinkered with some other color channels as well.

It was a matter of trial and error, of working with those various color and density controls until I got a balance that seemed right to me. (This is fast and easy on the computer, but very complex, very slow and very expensive in a darkroom, which is why I couldn’t do this book until now.) As I worked with the images more, I found myself going back to images I thought I’d finished earlier and redoing them. I also found myself developing relationships with the images themselves: even though I know nothing about the lives of any of these individuals I would come to feel, after looking at them on my monitor for many hours, that they needed to be lighter or darker than I’d previously printed them, or there should be more or less yellow or magenta. I can’t explain that: it’s just a matter of feeling, like music.