May 03 2006
Photo Manipulations
I would call the manipulated photograph of J. Edgar Hoover that I have presented earlier a rather bad cartoon, and that brings me to some thoughts on what we call ‘photography’ today.
Photo-manipulations are not new. There are examples of photographers manipulating their works that date back to the early days of photography. Some of these alterations made in the dark room were born out of pure necessity. With the long exposure times in daylight studios the braces that kept the neck and the upper body of the portrayed motionless often had to be retouched on the glass plate or the print. In the French postcards series of the beginning of the 20th Century pubic hair of models was removed with a soft pencil to avoid conflicts with the law.In the early days of Surrealism photo manipulations were used to add a new dimension to photography.
During the Second World War photo retouches were used for propaganda purposes. In the 1960s when photography was beginning to be accepted as an art form, a whole array of techniques was used to make photography competitive with painting. Printing portraits of children on thick canvas was just one of the many distressing examples of bad taste.Half a Century after the French postcards, magazine lithographers of Playboy started air brushing skins of Centerfolds to give them that plastic Barbie Doll look.
In 1998 as an editor in chief of the Dutch Playgirl I even ordered our lithographer to have the small potbelly of lead singer Barry Hay of The Golden Earring removed to make him more attractive as a centerfold for a largely female audience. Did I feel bad about it? No I didn’t. Potbellies come and go and rockers who are not touring tend to relax a bit. That is fine with me.
Only yesterday I came across a billboard of Sharon Stone promoting some sort of fragrance I believe and on the picture it looked like she had the skin of a fourteen year old, which was okay with me too, although I do rather see Jane Fonda in a Larry King interview telling the public that she will have no further face corrections, because she wants to finally ‘own’ her face. I thoroughly enjoyed her comment that most older American women are starting to look alike. Wrinkles are not attractive per se, but very young, almost transparent skins that show the veins underneath are not too exciting either in my view.
Lately I have run into a couple of debates with friends who manipulate every photograph they take in such a radical fashion that I cannot see why they used a camera in the first place. Whole backgrounds are removed and exchanged for new ones. People are added to the images or their position is altered. Colors and textures are tweaked to infinity. It is all possible thanks to Photoshop. The results are sometimes quite nice, but what am I looking at? Is it a photograph, a collage, or an illustration?
Maybe I should not care too much about technique because in the end it is the overall image that counts, but in reality I do care. I care in such a way that I get very annoyed when I see owners of photography galleries hastely proclaiming that they are certainly not against ‘new techniques’. They know very well that 99% of todays ‘photography’ is manipulated to such an extend that the images have little to do with what we have defined as photography for over 125 years. Still they want to be part of the buzz it seems, even if that means giving up on everything they have stood for during decades. At the same time more prestigious galleries and museums changed their attitudes in the opposite direction and are only cautiously accepting photography because their curators often feel fooled if they exhibit a photograph that is in fact a collage. I already stated that it is the overall image that counts, so what is my problem?
Well, I think if you add up all wall space of art galleries worldwide only 15-25% is (finally) reserved for photography and if that space has to be shared with the Photoshop artists who are promoted as the new masters then ‘real’ photography is back to where it was in the 1950s when 2% of gallery wall space was reserved for photography and I simply do not think that is a revolution to be cheered.
I am fully aware that I must sound like an old man who is quite conservative and probably I am. At the same time however, I keep finding rare and good examples of true innovative art based on photography. Most of that art is best presented on a medium that is as digital as the techniques used to produce it.