Digital Interventions

Digital photography is different to analogue photography in many obvious ways, but one major difference is that the tones in an image have steps. A digital image typically is made up of pixels, each of which is a different tone/colour. These steps are recorded by a CCD (charge-coupled device) sensor which generates an electrical impulse. No light - no reaction (0), light - reaction (1). There are a range of reactions which translate into a binary code to give a scale of shades. A CCD has to compress continuous tones and continuous lines into discrete packets of information, whereas analogue film can record this information continuously. Compression leads to loss of information. For example, if you compress a large RAW image into a .jpeg, all detail invisible to the naked eye will be lost.

To explore some of the basic ways of how digital photography has dramatically changed the way we can create images we had a digital interventions workshop in which we experimented with flatbed scanners and stitching. We used the stitching aid on Lightroom to make panoramic images using multiple continuous images of the same area.

Andrea Gursky is an artist who uses this sort of technique to create huge photographs such as "99 cent. 1999" (207 x 307cm). Because it is made up many images, the photography has no single vantage point and is geometrically flat, compared to the distortion a wide-angled lens may give due to its concave form.

My attempts of stitching, at first were hideously unsuccessful, with the middle of the panoramic being pinched in and single image being places separately from the rest of the panoramic. When I learnt to stay in one space while taking photos the end result was much better. At the moment I'm interested in works by Freya Jobbins, an assemblage artist who uses parts of dolls and other plastic toys to make portrait and figural sculptures. This gave me the idea of photographing parts of different people and digitally stitching them together to create either a sort of idealised figure, like the ancient Greeks using different models to create each part of a figural sculpture, or abstract images built up with different body parts.

Artists Aziz and Cucher created a series of images between 2004-2005 called "Dystopia", in which they removed the eyes and mouths of the people in their portraits by cloning skin over them. Taking away the eyes and mouths of people gives a sense of taking away their ability to communicate. The images appear silent, and perhaps are a comment on a culture losing their identity to modern technology that promotes anonymity and conformity. When Photoshop first became accessible to artists they began to experiment with it doing things they either couldn't have done in an analogue process or that would've been far too time consuming. The idea of distorting the face by digital means is what inspired the way I worked with the flatbed scanners.

Aziz and Cucher "Maria", C-Print, 40x50"