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| Watching: An Exhibition of Digital Photographs |
Today marked an end to a sort of evolution of my Digital Processes’ class presentations of our digital photographs. We began this evolution with a stop on the World Wide Web, utilizing programs that are part of Web 2.0, such as Flickr and Blogger, to present the world with our images and ideas. These images that were simply floating around in hyperspace were then harnessed and produced into tactile objects; books. And finally, we edited down from these many images a pair that would accurately and effectively portray the artist’s concept in a gallery setting for our exhibition called Watching. Setting up a gallery was a new experience for me, and I found it to be enjoyable working with others in the class to figure out the best way to complete the layout of the show. Being a little OCD, I think I would all too much enjoy setting up a solo show of my own work (as long as it worked out exactly as intended)! Although dramatically Photoshopping images was not prevalent in our show, it is still very fascinating to think about how the ability to alter images in almost any way imaginable nowadays has almost removed the ability of photographs to act as a sort of “evidence” or indexicality for the images they capture. I am highly interested in utilizing this exact power of photographs to make political statements in my artwork, and because of photoshop this concept is now in jeopardy. How will I prove my images to be real? Will there someday become a “certified organic” category of photography? We will have to wait and see!
This idea of having a "certified organic" category of photography seemed so shocking to me, yet the more I thought about it the more it became the inevitable next step. If people can use photoshop to manipulate and drastically alter their photos, how will anyone know which ones are true and which ones are not? As for the process of your artwork, in my opinion your final gallery photos really made a strong artistic statement and complemented each other very well. I'm impressed how your idea which 32 photos incorporated could remain just as true and strong in 2 larger-scale photos.
ReplyDeleteIt is truly fascinating how we can print out these floating images in hyperspace. Honestly, I am glad that we did not dramatically photoshop our images, because I feel like it would go against my representation of natural beauty and reality. Also I think the images you picked for the show were very strong!
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