4th paper

Johnson  4

Miah Nate Johnson

AIB/MFA

Oliver Wasow

Looking at Altered Images.

After Photoshop

Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age

Works by, Matthew Jensen,Kota Ezawa, Joan Fontcuberta, Matthew Porter, 

MoMA show 

THE SHAPING OF NEW VISIONS: PHOTOGRAPHY, FILM, PHOTOBOOK

Works By Philip Lorca-diCorcia, Gerhard Ruhm , Paul Graham, Martha Rosler.

“I would like to see photography make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable” Marcel Duchamp

Working in New York City on my photoessay “Disconnected” the exploration of people on cellular phones, I took a break and went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the show “After Photoshop” This show examines how artists have used digital technology to alter photographic images from the late 1980s to the present..(Source MET brochure)  

©MIAH

The following day I went to Museum of Modern Art to see “The shaping of New Visions: Photography, film, photo book”. The MoMA show looked into photography’s relation to the past and present development of contemporary artistic practices.

In seeing both shows, my aim was to focus mostly on the manipulated image, with a concentration on how the artist perceives, conceptualizes and exhibits different styles of photography and installations. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art show was a small review of works by some of the masters in the art of the altered digital image.  The first image is that of Beate Götshow who’s landscape photoshopped image is composed of several photographs blended together seamlessly to create a painterly pastiche art work.  Looking at this work it simply looked like a landscape one would simply walk by, not noticing that the work has been manipulated or altered by the artist.  Only looking more closely at the image does one notice things are just to perfect to be all in one image.

Robert Polidori, (Indian street scenes in which characters, buildings, phone lines are added to make as Polidori states “to make a decisive moment” Following in the realm of Henri Cartier Bresson a French street  photographer 1908-2004 who coined the term in his book published 1952 “The Decisive Moment”  taken from Cardianl de Retz  18th century quote  "There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment and the masterpiece of good ruling is to know and seize this moment".  Bresson changed this to read in the opening of his book The Decisive Moment "There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment" The American publisher, Dick Simon of Simon & Schuster choose this to be the title. 

Which formed a point of view in the photography world that the image taken should capture life at the precise moment when everything falls into place perfectly. 

Bradley Rubenstein uses portraits of children and then replaces the eyes of the children with puppy dog eyes, which are morphed into child's face, the photograph becomes a haunting eery void of expression. 

©Bradley Rubenstein

Debbie Grossman used photographs from Russell Lee 1903-1986, one of the many photographers who worked for the Roosevelt era Farm Security Administration an appointed commission which documented the 1930 depression era for the United States government.  The artist collected from the Library of Congress archives Russel Lee’s photographs from the FSA works portfolio called “Pie Town”. She then manipulated the original photographs by making the faces of the men more feminine, brought the women closer together to form a statement of intimacy and added a subdued color of that period making the photos believable.  The series is called “My Pie Town” as Debbie Grossman states, “Seventy years later, I am drawn to a similar utopian ideal. I'm filled with a longing to connect with that time and the people in Lee’s images – I've had a lifelong obsession with frontier life. I fantasize about locating myself within those pictures and that time. So in an attempt to make the history I wish was real, I have made over Pie Town to mirror my fantasy”. ( source More About Pie Town : www.debbiegrossman.com )

Another photographer drawn to the FSA works is Kota Ezawa who uses geometrical abstract lines of black and white strips to recreate the famous photograph of “Barber Chairs” from Walker Evans Farm Security Administration works of the 1930s.   The portfoilo is part of a series called “The History of Photography Remix” which he reworks the image through hand-tracing and computer manipulation, which stages a critique of photography without actually presenting it. (source www.artpace.com 21 Mar 2011).

©Kota Ezawa

One of the most powerful images that struck me was work done by Joan Fontcuberta. By taking thousands of google images she stitched them together using a density mapping technique or DOT density, with light and dark images. The viewer first notices the large image which upon looking closer it is composed of tiny images each one of an individual frame or dot, when standing back five feet the larger photograph comes into focus. Fontcuberta established a latent image by use of of this technique of first fixed photograph made in 1826 ever made by Niepce 1765-1833 a French inventor/photographer.  It is a well executed use of the digital age melding into the past of when photography was first invented.

  

©Joan Fontcuberta

MoMA show 

THE SHAPING OF NEW VISIONS: PHOTOGRAPHY, FILM, PHOTOBOOK

The show at the Museum of Modern Art show was quite different in style from the MET show. The show covered works from 1910 s to the current trend of the photo world. The works touch on many art movements from Dada, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Minimalist, Conceptual, and Post-Conceptual art. The four galleries showed photo books, traditional prints and manipulated digital photomontages. Unconventional and innovative ideas that range from photograms and photomontages to experimental films and photo books. The show moved from the concept of the risk takers, the avant guard or visionary makers of photography. Photomontages by Man Ray with film clips playing on the wall along side László Moholy-Nagy works with Helen Levitt street photos on an old Kodak carousel slide projector.  The galleries moved from time periods carrying the viewer into each generation of the new idea of photography.  Lee Freidlander fourteen American monuments project, Bernd and Hilla Becher Bauhaus design stylized architectural portfolios, William Eggleston’s Guide, portfolio, and Ed Ruscha Twenty-six Gas Stations fold out books where followed by the artist I will focus on.

Austrian writer composer, photographer Gerhard Ruhm, made into small scrap books or small diaries which showed voyeuristic photos of the notion of how woman are portrayed in society as wife, model, sex object and pornography. 

©Gerhard Ruhm

The photo montages of Martha Rosler with titles First Lady, House Beautiful, Runway, Cleaning the Drapes.  The work is composed of a single image where cutouts are placed onto the final print and rephotographed. The images are powerful statements of the time period of 1967-1972.  The suburbia blindness of America, the Vietnam war, and feminism.  They are simple works but are very strong in their content and design.

©Martha Rosler

A series of images followed by 6 books from Paul Graham consisted of one single staged image shot different perspectives of a woman who in some form of poverty on a porch smoking a cigarette, eating fast food and drinking. The images have an impact of tedium of the suffering or mental process of what might it be like to be poor?

©Paul Graham

Other works consisted of Philip Lorca di Corcia who’s works also staged show an idea of America, removed lonely souls, searching or questioning the sense of being. The posed potrait photographs give the emotional affect of the question of despair, loneliness, depression. 

©Philip Lorca di Corcia

Quote from show" The new world will not need little pictures," he wrote in The Conquest of Art (1922). "If it needs a mirror, it has the photograph and the cinema." El Lissitzky

The artists I looked at explore constructing a narrative in their works. Deliberately staged scenes, or montaged images originate creative inspirational imagination. These artist give the viewer convincingly perceptions of real scenes, symbolizing photography to depict the physical appearance of things that are untrue.  Many presenting the question of the denoting establishment of standard photography by reconstructing the photograph.  I was mystified by both the shows of looking into the illusionary world of manipulation of the photograph. The artist works in the show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art exposed a new age of looking at the world which has been around for twenty plus years. Both of these shows focused on the idea of artists using manipulation of photographs to create works that simulate the audience to make unreal real.  

 Before me was a world that was created by a thought process that I never really looked into, since I myself was trained as a documentary, photojournalist style of work, that the camera tells the truth.  As I starred at the images I consumed each one like a good meal. I realized that by dodging, burning, or cropping, I myself manipulate the image in a small sense of the craft of darkroom printing. 

  

Following the shows I had two appointments one with Robert Frank and a portfolio review set up by one of the board members with APERTURE Foundations president Chris Boot.  Robert Frank and I met and we talked of work and photography.  At APERTURE Chris felt my work was strong and in the sense or tradition of Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, but... “The world of contemporary photography has changed the traditional street photographer, working with film, darkrooms, and leica camera’s are really pass’e.   The ideas are based on concept more then technique”. I read this passage from Andy Grundberg's book, Crisis of the Real APERTURE PRESS states, "The character of photography in the new millennium will be something more overtly fabricated, manipulative, artificial, and self conscious then the photography we have come to know."

 I was baffled.  I walked forty blocks thinking where thirty years had gone and I was asleep?  How why, when where did it all go?  So I started to rethink myself as a street photographer back in my studio. My new body of work deals with the manipulating the image by placing cut outs onto a master print and rephotographing the image with a digital camera then going into APERTURE and blending images into the background to make a final print.  The aim is make photographs based on the tradition of the street photography but deconstructing the work into a political or social narrative for the viewer

Robert Frank’s hand and Leica ©MIAH