DEATH TO PHOTOSHOP!!!!!
by Bruce Price
Okay, okay, it's one of the world's great programs. Everybody
says so. The problem is that too many people are taking
photographs, messing with them in Photoshop and calling the results "digital
art."
Enough. Let me presume to lay down the law in a completely new and lawless
territory that I like to call the Digital Universe.
It's not enough if an image is taken with a digital camera or printed
out on a digital printer. A billion things a day are. It's
pointless to call the results "digital art." (But many art sites
and art shows do.)
It's not enough if a photo is retouched or manipulated in Photoshop.
Doing so is the norm now in photography. It's just silly to
call the results "digital art." But almost the whole world does.
What is so wrong with calling photographs photographs? I
say, if it was taken by a camera (there's a clue) and remains for the
most part a representation of something in the real world that a camera was
pointed at, then, what do you know, it's a
photograph!
Here's my modest proposal: you must
transform a photograph, using digital tools, into something substantially
different from
the original photograph before you can use the term "digital art."
Artists have been retouching and manipulating photographs for more than 100
years. Man Ray did dark room manipulations in
the 1920s. Ansel Adams did supersharp photographs in the 1950s. Richard
Avedon did those marvelous wildly colored
pictures of the Beatles in the 1960s. All without benefit of digital. Isn't
it a little pathetic to come along with a fancy new medium
and create stuff that's not as fancy as what came before?
Digital does not need the past. Digital, I believe, is all about the future.
It's about using wondrous new tools to make new
kinds of art. But I have been to so-called "digital art shows" where
almost all the work was photographs that could have been
created 25 years ago. A major digital gallery gave first prize to highly realistic
photographs that were just Ansel Adams redux
(i.e., very precise). How retro can you get.
When I owned a design business in Manhattan, I had the honor of hiring one
of the great retouch artists of all times, Sol
Schnaer. He could take anything out of a picture, or put anything in — all
with paint brush and airbrush. Photoshop makes this kind
of magic much easier. But conceptually there's nothing new. All too often,
people today are just doing a Sol Schnaer. Or they're
doing a Richard Avedon or Man Ray or Ansel Adams.
And hey, if you can take a beautiful photograph, I suggest stopping right
there! People don't get tired of what Mapplethorpe
did. If you're a great photographer, you don't need Photoshop, not
crucially, and you certainly don't need to call your beautiful
photographs "digital art."
I say death to Photoshop because way too many people think
Photoshop IS digital art.
This is a myth and a destructive one at
that. The public sees a few manipulated photos and thinks,"That's
digital art?
Pulp Fiction,
a digital painting
by Bruce Price |
What's new about that? What's so exciting?" Digital
art, properly hailed as a vast new universe, becomes diminished and denigrated,
finally becoming just a synonym for
Photoshop's ability to alter photos. Early on, I had a contrarian hunch:
if lots of people are running photographs through
Photoshop, a lot of this work will end up looking redundant, so maybe I
should avoid photographs altogether. Now (let me admit
it) I enjoy saying, "No photographs or scanned materials are used in
my work. I start with a blank screen..."
What exotic new territory does digital let us explore? I think this is the
question, the goal, the mission, that should obsess
digital artists. Why use watercolors to try to mimic oil paints. Why use photographs
to try to imitate either one? Why use digital
as merely an appendage to an older medium? I suggest that each medium is its
own brave new world, and perfect in its way. Let
it be what it can be!
In the case of digital, a new and distinctive vocabulary is emerging: gradients,
precision, layers, transparency, 3D effects,
extreme palettes, and a thousand filters and effects that have no parallel
in traditional media. These powerful tools enable us to
pursue, in a new way, the goal that art has been engaged with for the past
century or so — the depiction of new realities and new
visions. •
©
Bruce Price 2005. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Bruce Price has two other thought-provoking
articles on this site. For a quick introduction to digital, see "What's
all this talk about
digital?" For a wide-ranging discussion of experimental approaches
to painting and writing, read the popular: "MAX
your creativity." Bruce Price's digital painting can be seen on
his sites:
price.myexpose.com
and ArtNorfolk.com.
08/15/05
|
