After years of using a highly toxic, vintage chemical method to create her black and white collages inspired by fairy tales and myths, Chicago photographer Helena Chapellin Wilson began working on a computer. She knew two photographers who suffered serious liver damage from the same process and was becoming fearful of the chemicals. She was also feeling constrained by the technique itself and the long hours she logged in the darkroom.
For Stephen Marc, a former documentary photographer from Tempe, Ariz., switching to digital photography allowed him to combine intricate graphic patterns, painterly effects and old family photographs with what Henri Cartier Bresson called “the decisive moment” of snapping a picture.
Chicago collage artist Joyce Neimanas watched her computer collect dust for a year before she attended a workshop on digital techniques, which motivated her to give the process a chance. These days she uses a flatbed scanner and Adobe Photoshop to create digital compositions inspired by art history.
These photographers have joined what is generally recognized as the inevitable digital revolution.
Traditionalists maintain that digital techniques rob photography of its craft and artistry, that their ease and speed encourage artists to churn out images devoid of texture, luster and soul. They say that replacing time-honored, hands-on processes with the push of a button creates an impassable chasm between artists and their works and in the end alienates their audience as well.
But one thing is sure: At this point there is no turning back.
“We’ve got one foot in the chemical world and one foot in the digital world,” said Frank Barsotti, chair of the photography department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, describing the school’s approach to teaching photography.
His statement could apply to the state of art photography in general. Most digital artists today shoot with a traditional camera and then scan images into their computer. This allows them to alter virtually every aspect of the image with the click of a mouse. Some artists then convert their digitized artworks back to negatives to print in the darkroom.
Like the School of the Art Institute, Columbia College teaches students traditional photography before letting them dive into digital, said professor Tom Shirley, director of the college’s digital lab. “Although digital photography is becoming more and more mainstream, I think it will be another five years before it becomes affordable enough to make it practical to shoot all digital,” Shirley said. “Digital cameras are still so expensive, which puts them out of reach for most artists and students.” (Digital cameras start at $1,000 and can go as high as $25,000.)
“Basically, we look at computers as just another tool, a tool that makes a whole lot of things easier than ever before,” Shirley continued. “I don’t think it’s going to change the nature of the work; it will just make it easier and give people more possibilities to express their ideas.”
Added Laurence Miller, a New York photo dealer: “The issue shouldn’t be digital or not digital. You wouldn’t ask a poet, `Did you use a keyboard or a pen to write your poem?’ It should be what you’re saying and not how you say it.”
That idea appears to play out in the works of Chicago artists, who customize digital technology to fulfill their visions. Jason Salavon often creates images on the computer with software that he designs. For instance, he recently wrote a program that let him model action-hero figures in a range of colors and place them in group scenes. Frederick Herr, a digital artist and lecturer at Columbia, coats his layered self-portraits with encaustic, which is pigment mixed with beeswax.
Digital photography doesn’t just concern technique, however. It can alter how an artist perceives the world.
“Working digitally is a different thought process, one that I equate with drawing and painting,” Herr said. “You start with a blank canvas and build the image up. It’s an additive process that’s totally different than straight photography, which is a subtractive process. For someone firmly entrenched in traditional photography, being faced with a blank screen that has to be filled can be very difficult.”
Barbara Kasten, a photo artist and Columbia professor, agreed. “It changes a person’s vision. As a (traditional) photographer, you’re always selecting part of what you’re looking at and framing it. Now you go and look at snippets of things that you can assemble later.”
The new technology also means that photographers don’t have to worry about compositional nightmares such as a pesky lamp sticking out of a subject’s head. With the push of a button, the lamp disappears. Whether some of the photographer’s critical faculties disappear with it is up for debate.
“There’s this mentality today of, `Well, we can fix that flaw in the computer,’ ” Shirley said. “I think in the end the result is the same. It’s just a matter of when you choose to correct the problem.”
The biggest technical issue facing digital photographers is and has always been output, the problem of producing on paper what appears onscreen. The highest quality digital prints are made on Iris printers, very large and expensive machines originally intended to produce color proofs for print shops. Many photographers, including Wilson and Neimanas, send disks containing their works to digital print-making studios for Iris prints. In recent years, smaller inkjet printers have become increasingly affordable and sophisticated, giving artists more options for making smaller prints.
But there is still some catching up to be done.
“If you took a large-format negative and made a print, and then scanned an image and made a print and compared them, you would see a difference,” Shirley said. “The digital prints would not be as sharp. I do think there is a loss, but I think that what happens is that people realize the limitations of the media they’re working in and work around that.”
Digital photographers must also contend with the issue of permanence. Just a few years ago Iris prints began to fade after three or four months. Today digital printmakers are developing archival dyes that they hope will retain their rich color for up to 50 years, but it is still a concern.
Of course, photography purists will never accept digital work as anything but a poor substitute to the time-honored practice of using an analog camera and darkroom. John DeSalvo of Digital Artistry, a digital studio in Skokie, has heard just about every admonition in his seven years of enhancing and producing digital photographs for ad agencies and artists alike.
“Most traditional art critics and art connoisseurs see it as a holy terror, thinking, Oh my God, now we’re pumping tons of garbage out,” he said. “But it’s like the Impressionists. We’ve heard about a handful, but there were probably 5,000 artists doing it. By putting the digital process in the hands of artists, the good ones will come to the top like cream and the rest will fall away.”
DIGITAL ART ON THE FRINGE
On the fringes of digital art pulses a sub-genre unknown to mainstream audiences. Falling under the various headings of “electromechanical,” “robotic” or “mechatronic” art, it includes sculptural works that probe the intersection of technology and human behavior. These heady installations often combine audio and video components in computer-controlled environments and can make the most abstract two-dimensional digital art look ultra-accessible.
Now Chicago viewers can check out this techno-underworld at Deadtech, a new multimedia gallery in Logan Square at 3321 W. Fullerton Ave.
“Everyone thinks of digital art as being flat and two-dimensional, but mechatronic art will become more and more prevailing,” said Deadtech founder and owner Robert Ray, an artist who makes his living as an Internet and technology director in a large marketing firm. “There’s all this stuff going on and no one knows about it because most galleries and museums don’t show it.”
Deadtech’s debut in May featured KK Null, a Japanese performance and sound artist who plays the “Null-sonic,” a theremin-like instrument he designed, and video by Australian artist Seldon Hunt. In an exhibit opening July 25, Ray will showcase the more visually oriented pieces of Canadian artist Norman White, who has been creating digital art for 30 years. White’s longest running piece is “Helpless Robot,” begun in 1987, which attempts to assess and predict human behavior. The plywood-covered robot asks people in a synthesized voice to move it in certain directions and then records the results. “I like work that triggers a response in both the work and the viewer,” Ray said.
