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September 28, 2008
This picture of decay taken with a digital camera would be a suitable raw material to play around with using Photoshop. (I don't have Photoshop--I'm still exploring Lightroom). This step to Photoshop opens up different forms of creative image construction or manipulation using still cameras.
There is a strong reaction against Photoshop and not just from traditional (film) photographers. Photoshop is seen as a form of bad manipulation that distorts and lies about reality and so is a form of untruth. Untruth is bad.
An example of this position is Christopher Scanlan's recent op-ed in The Age entitled At the altar of the digital age. Scanlan lists various examples of how those using photoshop can manipulate reality to create an untruth in fashion, politics and science. He then quotes from Daniel Boorstin's 1961 book on the graphics revolution, The Image, where Boorstin warned of "the menace of unreality". Boorstin warned that we:
risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so 'realistic' that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.
Scanlan says that while Boorstin's concerns might now seem quaint we are still capable of distinguishing illusion from reality. He then finishes with the comment that "how long we will continue to make this distinction - and whether we will attach any importance to it - is another matter."
Not once is photoshop considered to be developing a different kind of aesthetic that is linked to postmodernism. Photography for Scanlan is a window on reality with minor interpretation and minimal postproduction by the photographer. It is a mode of representation not a mode of expression that arose with Romanticism in the nineteenth century in a revolt against the empiricism, instrumental rationality and the scientism of the Enlightenment.
Art need not be the expression of the emotion of its creator (the artist) as it can be a form of social expression. This art functions showing the "falsity of our enlightenment reality by reminding us of the "memory of what has been vanquished or repressed."
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