From today’s New York Times “Digital manipulation is just another tool. It’s less profound than the lens you use, or the angle. But in the end, photography is all about manipulation, and as it’s evolved, it’s become more manipulative in every way. I’ve never seen photography as a truthful medium. It’s about individual perceptions of reality, and that’s what people want to see.”
The Times examines the work of London photographer, Nick Knight. “When I’m producing a piece of work,” Knight says, “I’m looking for something I haven’t seen before, and once I’ve produced it, I’ll want to see something else.”
One of the world’s most successful fashion photographers, Knight lives in the digital world.
I realized that one of the most fascinating and potentially controversial and engaging aspects of digitally enhanced photography is that unlike any other visual art form before it, just about anyone with a computer can have at it. A great artist’s work (assuming you accept Knight as a great artist) becomes an interactive experience that can evolve, devolve and easily change according to the viewer’s own vision. Imagine a visual art form that is a photograph or creation that is the combined effort and vision of both the artist and the viewer(s). Warhol’s multiple images reimagined except the series is the work of the original artist digitally “enhanced” infinitely by his viewers.
Richard,
Thank you for the information. A whole new world for me. I have been googling Nick Knight,Devon Aoki and Visionaire. The books are expensive.
Warhol seems a perfect choice of subject for this kind of play, since he did so much of it himself. One gets the feeling of being in Warhol’s position as artist, trying out similar color manipulations, for example. I think this would make a great teaching tool, and I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t already made it the core of some installation. One thing it teaches is that it’s easy to create variations that are amusing or mildly interesting, but hard to make something one really cares about.
Richard, I’m struck that the color choices you made are very reminiscent of your other work, such as the one below. It would make a fun experiment to see if we are actually all distinguishable from this color sense alone.
Steve,
The orange color that I enjoy in Richard’s photo is missing from the manipulated Warhol image.
It’s not an exact match, but the feeling of fluorescent pastels seems Richard-like to me. Other work is certainly different, for example darker, more saturated colors in cityscapes. But color always matters.
We were discussing earlier if something can be art if it is something everyone can do. While no one came out and said that exactly, I have the feeling that the implication bothers people.
One concept of an artist is someone who achieve consistently superior results using the same basic methods that other people use to little result. Following that concept, something isn’t art if everyone can do it fairly easily and about equally well.
Richard, I don’t think digital manipulation is any more readily available to the ordinary person than paint or pencil. There is a perception that manipulating digitally is easier and lots (far too many for my patience) of people muck about with it, but few could conceive of doing what you did to poor old Marilyn (and Andy). That takes insight into the nature of Warhol’s work, the manipulation capability, and an understanding of the contemporary art world movements like appropriation. It also take an, ahem, particular turn of mind.
So while I rather like the democratization of art, the availability of one more tool, and I believe that ultimately great heaps of mediocrity will underpin much better stuff, I don’t think the seeming accessibility of computer graphics is too much of a threat.
Rest easy.
June,
I’ve been thinking about Warhol and I think you sort of have the thing backwards. It seems to me that what Warhol showed is that you don’t need to do anything technically difficult at all to be an important artist. With Pollack there is the belief that he was infinitely gifted with splattering, but there is no sense that Warhol did anything remarkable at all — except somehow become remarkable despite that.
When Karl said that “One concept of an artist is someone who achieve consistently superior results using the same basic methods that other people use to little result”, I thought that this was somewhat of a plausible explanation until you realize that one of the protagonists alluded to in this post turned that definition on its head… Silkscreen printing got Andy W. to achieve consistently inferior results, but it was the great Andy Warhol marketing machine that did the rest and assured his place in artist history… Good post, Richard.