We talk to Etienne Milette about what inspires him, and how he used Europeana.eu to find images to adapt for his book 'The Fractal Report'.
Hi Etienne, tell us a bit about yourself and how your book The Fractal Report came about.
My name is Etienne Milette. I’m an artist from Quebec, Canada. I have always done art, doodling, sculpting and drawing. The Fractal Report came from something unexpected and it's sort of a long story. My main work is handmade leather books, I've been doing grimoires and journals for a long time. It started a couple of years ago when I was doing live action roleplay with my friends. We were creating costumes, playing with foam swords and I made some leather books as props. They were simple at first, just a wrap of leather around a notebook. But my friends loved them, and wanted me to create more. From there I made more and more grimoires and books and it snowballed from there. I started doing trade shows and mediaeval fairs, and even Comicon - the big comic book convention with thousands of people - and I realised that there was a market for me to broaden my styles and designs.
For years, my leather books were always blank but I longed to create something inside. I wanted to create fantastical content that would match the magical look of my leather grimoires. So I had an idea, to create a fictional story. Handwritten and hand-drawn with watercolours, I created the journal of a fictional expedition from the 1870s that was lost into another dimension. I created a fictional font to write the words in the journal. I carved a little Rosetta stone-style plate in both Latin and the fictional font to act as the translation key. I made the journal like a movie prop - the kind of very old book that Indiana Jones finds inside a lost shipwreck. Inside of this illustrated book are memorabilia, newspaper clippings, fictional files, all sort of little notes, and most of all PHOTOGRAPHS. Amongst the pages, I added loose photos to create the illusion that this story was real, that someone took photographs of the actual creatures seen in the journal. This is when I found Europeana.eu and discovered all the potential of the digital collections. It began with a few modified photos, and after a while, I had enough photographic material to create a whole new book with just the photos themselves. What started as a few modified photographs to enhance a leather book became a new project in itself. The Fractal Report is made as a user manual for new recruits of the fictional secretive organisation that found the old journal and tried to uncover its secrets. The Fractal Report is available on my Etsy shop.
The Fractal Report is presented as a leaked document from the Office for Containment Control (OCC). It features approximately 90 photographs and reports of strange events, supernatural phenomenon and unexplained apparitions.
Tell us a bit about how you use Europeana.eu
When I found Europeana.eu, I felt like I’d discovered a whole new universe, I felt like a time traveller. In the photographs I found are major historical events, olympics, catastrophe, war, but there are a lot of mundane moments: portraits, school pictures, gatherings, hunters or the building of a house. These moments were so important to the people that they recorded it on film. But now, nobody sees the photos. I wanted to give a new life to an old picture, something that was forgotten, and make them alive again.
I looked for open images, mostly in the public domain. The public domain is important - it’s free but it’s more than free, it’s for everyone. It’s part of our history, so for me, these are my favourite ones.
I had fun searching - I used the same terms in different languages and enjoyed seeing the differences in what I found. I made folders of the best ones, then folders of the best of the best.
In The Fractal Report there’s a lot of stuff from Norway and Sweden, because I had a lot of results from collections there. That was the fun part - to look for a word and change the language and discover a whole new world.
Because of what I was trying to do, my process was like a reverse search. If I want to make a big monster come out of a building, I can’t search ‘monster and building’. You have to find the image but you have to see what is not there. This is the tricky part.
How do you work with old photographs?
I use Adobe Photoshop. The key is to match the texture of whatever you want to add to the texture of the original. I had to lower the resolution and look at the grain and match the visuals using blur and adding noise. It’s really fun! Sometimes I add a filter over the final collage so everything is merged flawlessly.
What has been your best find on Europeana.eu so far?
There is a lot of marine photography from the Norwegian navy. When I was doing the sea monsters and sea snakes, I found a lot of whaling pictures. Those pictures are rough and hard to see and they treat whales like meat, just hook them up like big fish. To make a monster with that, it’s like playing with the old beliefs - the idea of the monster in the sea. There’s something there that I really like. It’s shocking on the fictional level, and it’s shocking because it’s a real whale hunting photo.
What are you thinking about at the moment?
When I make leather books, it’s somewhat anonymous, it’s a craft. But writing has my name attached to it. It’s part of my journey to be seen, to be known. The Fractal Report is written in a kind of Wikipedia style - it’s as though it’s factual, something I find fairly easy to do in English. Right now, I’m starting to play with some ideas of writing, it’s giving me confidence to write a novel. I’ll write in French - and play with the craft and style. I want to write a novel inspired by myths and legends but backed up with archaeological evidence - like The Lord of the Rings but presented so you can believe it might be real.
Where do you find inspiration?
I follow Trevor Henderson - he always adds something creepy to his work. He made a creature with a siren head and made a video game with it. I like his work that takes a normal photo but when you look closely you see there’s a creepy thing there. He’s doing it for the fun of it.
I also like Alex Eckman-Lawn - he takes old pictures and does cut-outs and creates a deep layered picture, it’s really creative.
What plans do you have for the future?
I’m going to do volume two of The Fractal Report which will be more about ghosts and the paranormal. Europeana.eu is great for that - just take a normal picture of an 1880s house interior, put an ominous shadow in there, it’s just perfect. People in the olden days took 15 minutes to take a picture and so they always look creepy because they had to stand still while the picture was taken but they couldn’t actually keep their eyes still for that long, so they move around and end up just white in the photograph.
Right now I’m working on another report about the moon landings using pictures of the Apollo missions which are in the public domain. I’m using the same technique of matching the grain and adding things so it looks like they found ruins and artefacts. I’m aware that there’s enough fake stuff online and now I’m adding more - but I’m saying it’s entirely fictional. What they found on the moon wasn't that exciting - lots of rocks - so I am creating what I would have liked them to find.
