This is the question that our class has been exploring over the course of this week in both our readings and lectures.
Photography is relatively new as an art form and it's amazing to think how far the medium has gone since its first inception. The first photograph was taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce out of his window in Le Gras, France, in 1826. Although it is very grainy and difficult to recognize, it is different from any other medium that came before it.
It started out as an experiment and wasn't really considered in the realm of art until the early 20th century. Since then, the most significant addition to photography since the introduction of color film has been the incorporation of digital into the photography repertoire, which is a relatively new development. Since then, photography has been divided into two devoted camps, one devoted to the traditional methods used in film, and another that has embraced the new technology as a means of easy photo manipulation. Traditional photographers are repulsed by digital photography and photographers who work in digital cannot understand, with all the advantages of ease and spontaneity, why anyone in their right mind would still work in film. I believe that the staunch opposition and sides taken between the two forms of photography undermines the medium as a whole and prevents both means of being seen as viable options of self-expression. I am not going to engage in discourse over which form of photography is superior because that is entirely missing the point. Each have their respective advantages and disadvantages, and choosing one form over the other undermines the creative potential of the artist. While the mechanical process of traditional photography provides certain results, the path to which this is achieved doesn't have to be concrete. From the work materials of last week, we saw work by Ann Hamilton in which she used her mouth as an aperture. She created images using a pinhole camera device that could be placed in the mouth and pointed toward a subject. When she opened her mouth, the paper was exposed and the image was transferred to the surface.
This is one example in which the photographic process itself can be manipulated and in which the traditional conception of photography can be stretched.
Digital photography is opening up a new realm for the medium and turning the established convention on its head. Photography was always trusted for its ability to honestly capture real life. But now that any photograph can be imported into Photoshop and manipulated to heart's content, this attribute unique to photography is starting to change. The digital manipulation of images has sometimes been met with success, and sometimes with (gently put) unintended results (see below).
Complex Magazine did an amazing review on their website of 50 Great Moments in Photoshop History. Another great source for terrible Photoshop work is the blog Photoshop Disasters.
However, not all Photoshop work is crap, nor is it only a tool for sinister intentions of manipulating real life. Digital Art professor Craig Hickman sees things where others don't. Though that could be said for any artist, Craig uses the power of Photoshop to create things that should be there. His work weds the real, physical world with surreal concepts. Craig has done a whole series of images where he uses Photoshop manipulation to create text and images on signs and walls where nothing initially existed. Craig's work takes the ordinary physical world and attempts to imbue it with some magic. What this seems to do is disrupt our normal relationship to the external world and surprise us with a new perspective. We are conditioned to see advertising that asserts or commands an action or impulse from us, and it comes as a complete shock when we instead encounter ideas and metaphors instead. On a marquee where we would maybe expect to see "99 cent cheeseburger" we instead find "sodium thiosulfate." Since I am unable to copy any images from Craig's website onto this blog due to copyright, you can see his work by clicking here.
A lot of what artists do is experiment with that balance of the internal and external world. This is especially true of photography. We have a unique relationship to photography in that it replicates the external world with such accuracy that we feel close to the subject. Unlike the process of other mediums, film is very spontaneous and mechanical; the camera is pointed, the aperture and shutter speed are adjusted to provide the desired shot, the photo is snapped, the image being transferred to the negative. The film is sent through various baths of chemicals to expose the negative image. The image is transferred to a surface. Take, develop, print. That's basically the process of photography in a nutshell.
But as we can see, photography does not need to be confined to the conventional methods of point-and-shoot.
To me, photography is one of the most exciting mediums to use. The development of color film yields instantly yields colors that would take much longer to replicate with paint. The process of imitating the natural world is relatively simple. Because of the medium's novelty, there are still many more ways that the medium can be stretched and explored. Another one of my favorite artists, Dan Eldon, uses the method of drawing directly on the developed image. Eldon was a white boy who grew up in Kenya most of his live and had an uninhibited sense of curiosity, exploring outside with camera in hand, documenting the natives whom he met along his travels. He tragically died at the young age of 22 while on a photo shoot for Reuters in Somalia, documenting the civil war there, but his beautiful journals forever serve as a testament to his memory and his creativity. His use of drawing on images and embedding them into his journal pages in a form of collage reflect a tradition of folk art and created an organic element to the chemical and mechanical energy of photography. Suddenly, these images were not rigid and permanent, but became melded with the organic brushstrokes of the human hand.
The potential that photography has as a medium is exciting to imagine. There are many more ways that photography can be used that haven't been explored by anyone… yet. All it takes is a bit of excitement and sense of fun. If the work is taken too seriously, it will continue to be confined to the conventions that have been established for it. It is up to us as artists to always explore the potential of our work, sometimes with reckless abandon, and to be impervious to failure.
As the weeks pass in this course, I begin to recognize a recurring idea regarding process: curiosity, wonder, novelty. To be a creator, the world needs to be approached every day with new eyes, always striving to see the same thing in many different ways. One thing that i struggle with in my art is surmounting that ominous slope of conventional thinking and to not be intimidated by it or held back from this objective by fear of failure or fear that I am doing something incorrectly and that there is a correct way to do things. With photography it can be very easy, based on the mechanical aspect alone, to be thinking of work in terms of correct and incorrect, wrong and right. It takes courage to put this type of thinking aside and fully trust your abilities as a creative thinker. However, it is possible, and when that pandora's box of creativity is finally opened, there's no telling how it would be possible to stop of deluge of creative ideas that begin flowing from your noggin.
There are so many more places photography can be taken to and expanded upon. The potential that photography has as to where it can go is exciting.
No comments:
Post a Comment