As promised in the
previous post I want to look at the implications of
digital manipulation, commonly called 'Photoshopping'. Photoshop is of course a specific package so I will
use digital manipulation or DM from now on, as a generic term for the whole range of digital
manipulation tools available.
I want to start however from a
slightly different
perspective, with Dadaism
and Marcel Duchamp.
When Duchamp signs mass-produced objects . . . and sends them to art exhibits, he negates the category of individual production. The signature is inscribed on an arbitrarily chosen mass product because all claims to individual creativity are to be mocked. Duchamp's provocation not only unmasks the art market . . . it radically questions the very principle of art in bourgeois society according to which the individual is considered the creator of the work of art. Duchamp's Ready-Mades are not works of art but manifestations.
I start here because a
frequent complaint about DM work is that its output is not artistic because it
is not the work of individual effort and has no ‘craft element’. I shall come
back to that second point later. For now consider the question of individuality.
Typically photography is
defined by its literalness. In that view, the photographic image is a direct description
of reality not a representation of it. In practice of course the
photographer has selected from the world just as much as the painter. The image is
defined as much by what is outside the frame as by what is included and is
inevitably only an approximation of the real world it purports to capture.
Although I took my first photograph some 40 years ago, it took me some time to
recognise this. Accepting this separation however frees the photographer from
the tyranny of literal representation. Since DM requires an
original photographic image, there is already therefore a degree of selection from the
world involved and that of itself is an artistic choice.
By representative I do not necessarily mean figurative. If the apparent parallels between the image as captured and the world in front of the lens had not distracted us, this would have been obvious anyway, as photographers explored the use of differential focus, distorted or out of focus images, solarisation and grain. Some, like Man Ray or Angus McBean, pushed the boundaries to the limits but all of these techniques met some hostility from ‘traditionalists’ before being absorbed and accepted as a part of the aesthetic of photography.
DM, obviously also involves image manipulation. This may be limited to the application of a single filter or tool. At this point some problems of terminology arise, because these filters are described so often in terms derived from painting – brushes, watercolour etc. Where packages like Corel Painter are used to originate a piece of work then this is probably useful since it allows the artist to work by analogy. At its best though, DM is not about mimicry but about creating something that cannot be created in any other way.
Statements like this - If you can score a copy of the 800-pound behemoth known as Adobe Photoshop, you can fake artistic ability with the best of them - don't help however, even when they obviously come from computer geeks rather than artists. As with any art form, there be good and bad examples. Sturgeon's Law applies here too. I suspect that the difficulties many have with it however is the ease with which images can be created which can give the appearance of having been created in ‘conventional’ media but in practice have never seen a brush. Take this image for example – derived from one of my own photographs – which has been processed in Paint Shop Pro using two ‘plug ins’.
My intervention was
pretty much limited to selecting the strength of the parameters to be applied. (I cloned out some road signs before applying the filters) There are
five parameters, each of which can be given a score of 0 to 100. In theory
therefore there are 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible
combinations (1020). In practice a variation of 1 or 2 is unlikely
to be noticeable but there is still a huge range of choices that can be made.
I’m making no claims for this as ‘high art’ – whatever that means – but I
contend it still has value, even as a faux ink and wash drawing. A ‘craft
skill’ is still present even in this relatively mundane image - a point made to
me in an email about another image of mine – also on Flickr.
…I don’t think it matters even a little bit how long something took to create - some great ones come in the blink of an eye and others that one spends a long time on just never make it into the really good category - I think it depends more on whether or not you are connected to your "source" and it feels like "this is me in action"…
Digital technologies now offer more opportunities for new ways of seeing the world. To some it offers the opportunity to create new realities by creating realistic digital collages
– not always for reputable purposes it must be said – while for others it
offers the chance to further blur the boundaries between photography and other
media. So far however there does not seem to be an agreed aesthetic response to
the characteristic feel of the digital image or a digital equivalent to the
painter’s brush stroke.
One of the debates raging within photo clubs across the world, as many cross over from film to digital camera usage, is what should be allowed in the post processing of digital images. One community is for minimal post processing. Another group would like to see only what could be done in a wet darkroom be allowed. And finally there is a third group that says anything goes.
As with the move from
painting to photography, from monochrome to colour, so now the move from chemical
to digital is generating a new debate on what is ‘acceptable’ – on what is ‘Art’.
While at its simplest level DM may involve only the application of a pre-written filter, it can be much more complex of course. Something that appears to be gaining in popularity is the ‘Orton’ effect. This involves layering of different treatments of an image to produce a very distinctive effect. The effect may well be possible in other media but its conception depended on the existence of digital manipulation.
Sites like Flickr are good places to check out work that pushes the boundaries in this way.
Check these out:
