Gallery: Cosmic GIFs Remind Us We're All Made of Stars
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Ignacio Torres's series Stellar is inspired by the famous phrase by Carl Sagan, "we are made of starstuff."
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The phrase that inspired the series refers to the fact that the basic elements of our bodies and our world were forged in the furnaces of ancient stars.
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The animated GIFs in Stellar were made with a 35mm camera sporting four lenses, allowing Torres to combine the images digitally.
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The celestial clouds were made with by tossing flour mixed with reflective confetti. Some stars were also added digitally.
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Returning from New York, Torres was inspired by the deserts of his home town of El Paso, Texas, which serves as the backdrop to these images..
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Bodies twirling in the dust could just as easily be falling from the sky as popping up from the ground, emphasizing the link between Earth and the heavens.
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"I think people immediately grasp it, the concept of being made from stars, and I chose to kind of conceal the subjects’ faces, so people kind of see themselves in the imagery," says Torres.
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The shoots took place over five evenings at sunset in spring of 2011.
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The three-dimensionality of the images, achieved by "wiggling" between four frames, is meant to tie the sense of motion around a vast galaxy to motion around a single human being, tying the two together even further.
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Born and raised in El Paso with family on both sides of the border, Torres has always identified as both Mexican and American. This is exactly the kind of ambiguity that the phrase behind the series undercuts -- we're not different, we're all made of the same stuff.
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"The core concept in the Stellar series is our identities as human, and we’re all the same, we’re all connected," says Torres.
