Digital Photo Manipulation - Is it Art?
Digital photo manipulation for artistic creations has its own history, also reaching far back into the early life of photography.
Long before the early development of digital media, and the resulting computer hardware and software, that transformed the ease and the depth of manipulation achievable for politics and art, artists physically transformed their images through simple collage.
The American photographic artist Allen Dutton during the 1960's and 70's created fragmented yet intriguing photographic collages.
Dutton usually composed the collages from 'found' photographs, cropped and pieced together to form interventions with a landscape, and then re-photographed to remove evidence of the collaging process that he had utilized.
Digital photo manipulated works such as 'Plausible Humbuggery of the perspective' and 'Who said sculpture was dull' depict human body parts in unusual arrangements, set in landscapes both rural and urban.
Dutton's work could be considered transitional, as an earlier physical form of a hand produced photoshop - represented in its final state as a single image.
A single image, yet created in its origin from collaged photographic fragments - cut, dodged, filtered, scaled, compiled, and then re-merged to a single entity.
Wallace Berman, another artist of this period whose practice up until his tragic death in 1976, was to also manipulate photographic images of popular culture arts.
Berman used scavenged advertisements from the mass culture of the time, and then re-photographed the compiled manipulated photographs.
His work often represented the aesthetic of the popular culture that surrounded him into politics and art, but when recompiled as collage, these representations often transgressed the considered morals of the time, with the resulting consequences from the authorities, albeit the images were only 'manipulations and seemed so random'.
Also utilizing collaged photographic images in his artistic practice is Richard Prince.
Prince is renown for his powerful advertising images including the unmistakably American wild west cowboy cult images, that take their name from the brand power they depict as the Marlbaro Man, which ironically is based on a fallacy in that the American cowboy is and has been predominantly ethnically Mexican.
Prince's work over the years has resulted in the creation of various bodies of appropriated photograph manipulations into political arts, that provoke the accepted reality of the initial imagery.
His early image manipulations such as the Nurses Series involved the use of appropriated mass produced book covers, collaging with them other found imagery from girlie magazines to create a new individual reality from the accepted 'Mills and Boon' version of love and romance, to imply a tale of lust and lewdness.
Prince re-photographed the collaged images with their ambiguous narrative, and printed the resulting image to canvas as popular culture arts.
He then sets about to apply liberal layers of paint, applied with an expressionistic gestural method including smudges and drippings.
Long before the early development of digital media, and the resulting computer hardware and software, that transformed the ease and the depth of manipulation achievable for politics and art, artists physically transformed their images through simple collage.
The American photographic artist Allen Dutton during the 1960's and 70's created fragmented yet intriguing photographic collages.
Dutton usually composed the collages from 'found' photographs, cropped and pieced together to form interventions with a landscape, and then re-photographed to remove evidence of the collaging process that he had utilized.
Digital photo manipulated works such as 'Plausible Humbuggery of the perspective' and 'Who said sculpture was dull' depict human body parts in unusual arrangements, set in landscapes both rural and urban.
Dutton's work could be considered transitional, as an earlier physical form of a hand produced photoshop - represented in its final state as a single image.
A single image, yet created in its origin from collaged photographic fragments - cut, dodged, filtered, scaled, compiled, and then re-merged to a single entity.
Wallace Berman, another artist of this period whose practice up until his tragic death in 1976, was to also manipulate photographic images of popular culture arts.
Berman used scavenged advertisements from the mass culture of the time, and then re-photographed the compiled manipulated photographs.
His work often represented the aesthetic of the popular culture that surrounded him into politics and art, but when recompiled as collage, these representations often transgressed the considered morals of the time, with the resulting consequences from the authorities, albeit the images were only 'manipulations and seemed so random'.
Also utilizing collaged photographic images in his artistic practice is Richard Prince.
Prince is renown for his powerful advertising images including the unmistakably American wild west cowboy cult images, that take their name from the brand power they depict as the Marlbaro Man, which ironically is based on a fallacy in that the American cowboy is and has been predominantly ethnically Mexican.
Prince's work over the years has resulted in the creation of various bodies of appropriated photograph manipulations into political arts, that provoke the accepted reality of the initial imagery.
His early image manipulations such as the Nurses Series involved the use of appropriated mass produced book covers, collaging with them other found imagery from girlie magazines to create a new individual reality from the accepted 'Mills and Boon' version of love and romance, to imply a tale of lust and lewdness.
Prince re-photographed the collaged images with their ambiguous narrative, and printed the resulting image to canvas as popular culture arts.
He then sets about to apply liberal layers of paint, applied with an expressionistic gestural method including smudges and drippings.
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