Breaking Pictures

I’ve been manipulating the inner workings of images for a while. Essentially, it’s a digital image that I have opened up in a hex editor, changed the code around and then resaved. For these portraits I thought it would interesting to add something personal from the sitters. So, after I’d photographed each person and loaded the image onto the laptop, I asked them to name a favourite song. I then cut and pasted the lyrics from their song straight into the code. Resaving the file then causes the image to “break.” the results are quite unpredictable, which is part of the appeal.