Karen Johnson – A Photographic Life
Traveling down life's road with my Fuji X-Pro 1 and X100s in hand
Hunters Point
“Hunters Point” ©2023 Karen Johnson All Rights Reserved
Hunters Point in Long Island City. One of my favorite places to visit.
Three Little Maids From School
“Three Little Maids From School” ©2023 Karen Johnson All Rights Reserved
There is something so desolate about abandoned bathrooms.
I’m Here To Serve You
“I’m Here To Serve You” ©2023 Karen Johnson All Rights Reserved
Blue Room
“Blue Room” ©2023 Karen Johnson All Rights Reserved
Photographed at an old abandoned hotel. Loved the blue wall and the falling ceiling. I can’t wait for the warm weather to come back so I can get back to exploring.
LIC Street Art
“LIC Street Art” ©2023 Karen Johnson All Rights Reserved
Wonderful street art in Long Island City this morning.
Sinuous Rise
“Sinuous Rise” ©2022 Karen Johnson All Rights Reserved
A Glance Back
“A Glance Back” ©2022 Karen Johnson All Rights Reserved
I have been working with MidJourney, an Artificial Intelligence program, using my abandoned photography. The haunted building in this building was created using a photography I took of an abandoned building at New York Farm Colony and adding descriptive text to produce this. The man and the ghost to the left were characters are generated in AI and the ghost on the right is an image I photographed at a Halloween Haunt I had permission to photograph this past fall.
I love the ability to create stories using both my photography and AI.
Aria
“Aria” ©2022 Karen Johnson All Rights Reserved
Photographed this old opera house this past weekend. I love the architecture.
Things Forgotten…
Photographed at Wilson Castle in Protor, Vermont.
Dark Circus
Composite of AI generated prompts as well as my own photography. Inspired by “Something Wicked This Way Comes”
The Walls Talk To Me
This is a composite of an AI text prompt by me in Midjourney that created the room, my photography of the model, and a background from a painting at the Museum of Modern Art. I colorized the room because the prompt gave me a black and white image. The ai prompt was a a room with walls made out of a variety of faces, haunting, moody, photography, canon 35mm lens. The rest I added to make it my own vision. I really love the creepy feel of it!
Fire Angel
Combining Ai prompt term generated art using Midjourney and my photography. Background is abandoned Scranton Lace.
Angelic Being
I discovered a great ai generating site called “Midjourney”. It is an ai powered system that generates art through text. I have been learning how to use through youtube videos. For Angelic Being I used the terms: “highly detailed full body character of an angelic figure with wings, full body, in the style of terry gilliam, angelic face, highly detailed, photo realistic, dark fantasy atmosphere, 8K, octane render, unreal engine”. Those terms produced the above.
My goal is to incorporate what is produced into my images. I’m still playing around and learning how to really push it and get what I am looking for. All I know is that I am having a blast with it!
Silver Deco
The Education of a Young Woman
Abandoned detention center.
Twins Pretending To Be King
Oak and Iron
Officer’s quarters photographed at Fort Adams, Newport, RI.
The creaking of a door …
Officer’s Rooms Fort Adams, Newport Rhode Island
To Seize A Brush, To Plaster Your Thoughts
Forever Sleeping
“I Know Places To Hide”
Photographed at an abandoned Tuberculosis hospital.
And It Stirs My Blood Like Wine
Photographed at Tewksbury Asylum in Tewksbury, MA. I love the face image in the tub where the faucets would have been.
Memory of a Mansion
Grand living room photographed at the Wheeler Mansion. I just loved the light and detail in this room. Still such beauty in this room.
Office Blues
Another image from the Wheeler Mansion. Love the blue walls and architectural details.
Pretty In Pink
Pink Bathroom at the Wheeler Mansion in Orange, MA. Owners are starting to renovate for an Air BnB. This mansion was featured in HuLu’s “Castle Rock”. I just love this color combination.
Nature’s Bedding
Abandoned Hotel and Spa Resort in upstate New York. I love the moss growing on the bed and carpet. That spark of orange in the carpet goes beautifully with the moss green!
Double Suite
Photographed at an abandoned hotel in upstate New York. The wallpaper is the best!
Hedylogos
Photographed at an abandoned hotel in upstate New York. Incorporated two paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art . Added wine bottle, remote and cigarette and smoke.
Waveny Park Winter December 2021 No. 1
Hoover Clean
Old abandoned hotel in upstate New York.
“Va Va Voom”
Photographed at an abandoned tuberculosis sanitarium in upstate New York. I loved the collage look of the graffiti.
“The Uninvited”
Portals
Whispers In The Hallway
“Whispers In The Hallway” ©2021 Karen Johnson All Rights Reserved
Photographed at an abandoned Tuberculosis Asylum. The hallways stretched on forever. I liked the little pops of color from the graffiti but just the length of this hallway alone was so interesting.
It Is Balloon!
I had a wonderful day photographing an Abandoned Asylum with Silver Crescent Photography and Buried By Time. The red balloon caught my eye. I loved the partial wall still left so that you could see down several rooms. Love photographing these old places and meeting like minded photographers.
Red Hall
Photographed an abandoned detention center this past weekend. This has to be one of the best hallways I’ve photographed. Between the color and peeling paint I just love it!
ECC 2021
My submission to the Edinburgh Collage Challenge 2021. We had to use a cassette tape or parts of for our collage. All images are mine except for the painting, “Mariana of Austria (1634-1696) Queen of Spain” by Velaquez from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access and the tape mass I used for hair which is by Dan-Cristian Paduret on Unsplashed.
PCC Week 22/2021
This weeks submission to the Paris Collage Collective Challange. The original image I was given by the PCC is by Jake Bluker on Unsplashed.
The background sky and city you can see through the tunnel is my image of New York City at sunset from Gantry Park. The nude is “Odalisque” by Jules Joseph Lefebvre
Eureka!
Another image from the abandoned hotel. I loved this blue vacuum cleaner just sitting there among the decay.
Busy Day At The Office
I went to a great workshop this weekend put on by Dave at Silver Crescent Photography and Mike at Buried By Time Photography. This office was located behind the stage and the lighting was perfect.
PCC Week 17 and 18
Image we were given to work with.
Paris Collage Collective on Instagram (#pariscollagecollective) has a weekly challenge to create a collage with the image you are given for that week. I really enjoy working on these. You have about a week which is a short period of time for me to create a piece but it really pushes me to be creative. I love doing collages digitally because I really can’t stand having pieces of paper around.
Renaissance Man
This is a piece that I created for a collage challenge on Instagram called the #loobyrouxartclub. This is the week 2 challenge which we were given five words: Enclosed, Tangle, Stem, Map and Clock. You can use all the words, one word or any of the five to create a piece. I used Enclosed, Tangle, Map and Clock. I have also been doing a weekly challenge by the Paris Collage Collective. In that challenge we are given an image and must incorporate all or a part of it in our work. I’ve been having a lot of fun doing this and it really pushed me to think relatively quickly to come up with a piece. I use my image as well as images from the public domain to create the piece.
The Sound of Glass Breaking #6
Number six in my series, I used a vintage image from the Library of Congress. It is of Dame Christabel Pankhurst, a British Suffragette. The background is a mixture of images I photographed at a trolley graveyard, Brimfield Antique and Flea market, graffiti in New York City and various landscapes and digital collages I have made. There is even part of a painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
With this image I was taken with the starry sky emerging from the gramophone and wrapping its way around Christabel. I wanted her to appear strong and yet mystical.
The Sound of Glass Breaking #5
“The Sound of Glass Breaking #5” is a look at the explosion of color. I colorized the vintage photo of the woman (I do with all my vintage photographs) and then layered mosiac tile I found on the Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access site on her jacket and her dress is layered with the painting “White Plum Blossoms and the Moon” by Ito Jakurchu. The rest of the piece is made up of images I have taken. Sunflowers from a farm in Connecticut, graffiti, cityscapes, and landscapes. All layered to create an abstract background.
The Sound of Glass Breaking #4
Finished #4 in the series. This one I wanted to celebrate women in science. I used a few Photoshop actions to get some of the layers. One of the action is a Da Vinci drawing effect which takes an image, in this case the woman at the desk, and turns it into a drawing that has all the writing and feeling of a Da Vinci drawing. I then brought the original image back in as a layer and removed the drawing where I wanted the original image to come through. I have close to 100+ layers on this piece.
The Sound of Glass Breaking #3
Third in the series, I worked with a background of Times Square in New York City. I brought in other images I had taken in the Bowery, Sheridan Square, trees looking out from a park overlooking the Queensboro Bridge and SoHo. I also used images I had taken at Trolley Graveyard, Carrie Furnace and Packard Plant and an abandoned Catskill resort. I have approximately 60-70 layers in Photoshop that I used to create this piece. I love being able to use the thousands of images I have taken over the last 11 years to create new pieces of digital art and collage.
The Sound of Glass Breaking #2
The second work in my series “The Sound of Glass Breaking #2”. This again is made up of a majority of my own images. The vintage image is from the Smithsonian Museum Open Access Program. Her dress is decorated from a beautiful mosaic that I photographed in the Lexington/59th Street Subway station. The mosaic is by Elizabeth Murray. The background and wheel are from an airplane graveyard I photographed as well as graffiti from the Packard Plant in Detroit and images from the Tribeca area of NYC. Vintage butterfly and bird cage are from Graphics Fairy.
I’m really enjoying working with collages. I have completed 3 works in this series so far and I am in the middle of working on a fourth. I’m hoping to have a total of 5-6 pieces for this series.
The Sound of Glass Breaking #1
I started a new series of work, “The Sound of Glass Breaking.” I watched a great presentation on collages through the Metropolitan Museum of Art and decided to really work on a piece. This series is inspired by my love for Amanda Gorman’s poetry, Kamela Harris being our first female Vice President and a great T-shirt . The T-shirt is a picture of broken glass with a a pair of converse sneakers among the shards and it says “Where shoes ladies, there’s glass everywhere.” I ordered the t-shirt through Etsy because I just loved it.
The image above is composed of 99.9% of images I photographed over the years. I enjoyed the whole process of creating this piece because I had to look back over thousands of images I made over the past 11 years. I didn’t realize the breadth of work I have created. The process of layering pieces and taking just little parts of an image is just so much fun. I don’t start with any preconceived idea. I just let my emotions take over and create it.
Cacophony
I photographed the woman in this image at MOMA when it opened it’s new section in October of 2019. I used Fotoda to combine that image with a few of my other NYC iphone images to create this “cacophyony” of colors in NYC.
Echos of Hops
“Echos of Hops” ©2023 Karen Johnson All Rights Reserved
Abandoned brewery.
A Creak In The Attic
“A Creak In The Attic”©2023 Karen Johnson All Rights Reserved
Love old abandoned attics! Happy New Year!
Karen Johnson - A Photographic Life 