Russell Kaye sent this image over to me on Friday after my floaters post, and I was flummoxed by it. That is to say, it looked Photoshopped, but I couldn't understand quite how.  I wrote Russell back, and it turns out the image was made for Outside Magazine "at the turn of the century"; it was shot straight on negative film, and the manipulation was done in the darkroom. Russell appropriated the technique from Tom Baril, who was Robert Mapplethorpe's gifted printer; he regularly diffused Mapplethorpe's portraits with inventive techniques like putting pantyhose over the enlarger lens.

It's funny, but this kind of thing makes me feel all fuzzy and nostalgic. I feel a greater connection to this image knowing it was created in the darkroom... it seems somehow historical. Sort of in the same way that Vincent Laforet's tilt-shift photographs get me; when I first saw the aerial sports imagery in Play a few years ago it was thrilling.


photo by Vincent Laforet

I'm a nostalgic person in general, so I think I am reacting to my own school room connections to the darkroom and the view camera. I mean, does it matter how an image comes to look how it looks? Maybe I just miss the craft, the physicality of camera and darkroom tinkering. Certainly there is more manipulation than ever in imagery. Russell has since stopped using so much softness because it "became way too trendy," even though now he's shooting 4x5 and using Photoshop and Epson as his darkroom. I think Russell is nostalgic as well. He says he "loves it that the year 2000 was the old days."

All this came up in my brain this morning again when I saw an article in Folio saying Glamour editor and ASME (American Society of Magazine Editors) president Cindi Leive is thinking about facilitating a panel about digitally altered magazine imagery. This comes after the Periodical Publishers Association--the U.K.'s version of ASME--announced its plan to hold discussions about banning digitally altered images of celebrities altogether. Leive is quoted saying "Readers should never be misled about what they're looking at."

Wow, that's quite a statement. I mean, this is a very slippery slope. Because Everything is manipulated. Does it matter? What IS imagery now? I don't think a photograph is considered a document of truth the way it used to be, and it hasn't been for some time. People have been altering images forever. I mean, it's part of the game. This struck me recently when I went to see an exhibit entitled "The Art of the American Snapshot" at the National Gallery in DC. There were so many trick shots using forced perspective, and it seemed a carefree example of the inclination to make things seem different from reality in a photograph. Because isn't that the whole point? Creating an image of one's own, particular view of the world?


photographer unknown, gelatin silver print, 1920s.


Marshall Mcluhan, help us out here. I dug old Marshall up this morning from the college stacks, and it's pretty amazing how resonant his words from a 1964 essay entitled Understanding Media still are:

"Every culture and every age has its favorite model of perception and knowledge that it is inclined to prescribe for everybody and everything [...] At any rate, in experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritants or technology. For those parts of ourselves that we thrust out in the form of new invention are attempts to counter or neutralize collective pressures and irritations. But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit. And it is here that the artist can show us how to 'ride with the punch,' instead of 'taking it on the chin.' It can only be repeated that human history has a record of 'taking it on the chin.'


I'm interested to see how these Photoshop panels shape up. I don't want to take anything on the chin.

* Within minutes of posting this, two friends reminded me of Errol Morris' great series of essays in the Times about Roger Fenton's war photographs, which were manipulated before he took them, and what the repercussions of that are. Check it out, it's a good read.