Essay
Perfect Pairings
These combined images are more than the sum of their parts.
As a photojournalist, much of Caroline Yang’s work focuses on the immediacy of getting the storytelling shot. But in recent years she started experimenting with double exposures, combining multiple images into one. In time she found the resulting compositions were a way to express herself through unpredictability.
“This gave me another way to tell stories and express myself,” she says. “Images are overlaid and blended to convey the complexities of identity, loss, and hope. You can evoke so much more emotion, and you can do it in such subtle ways.”
For Yang, the process brought back the intrigue of being in the darkroom, anticipating how an image would be revealed on paper while processing film. In creating double exposures, “That magic was back.”
She dove into her archive, looked at photos she had not shared or used, and started combining, often incorporating natural imagery such as trees and blossoms. Here are some of the resulting works.
