Putting a twist on the argument
Dec. 15th, 2002 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mbarrick
This goes back to Ed Book's comments about the in-camera manipulations that digital cameras do and about Photoshop manipulations. Below is an image that "all I did was resize it in Photoshop": |
© 2002 Michael R. Barrick |
This picture was created entirely in-camera using the "whiteboard" settting of the camera (which is intended to capture text written on a whiteboard). So, by the conventional logic of the photography groups this would be a "pure" photograph, unsullied by additional "cheating" in photoshop. Of course I could have gotten exactly the same effect by using Photoshop to reduce a photo to a 1-bit pixel depth. Or by creating an old-fashioned halftone using traditional photographic techniques. Or I could have drawn something quite like this with a pen and ink.
So what is more "pure" and why? And why does it matter at all?
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Apples and Oranges
Date: 2002-12-16 10:51 am (UTC)The questions that digital manipulation bring to photography are rather similar to the questions photography and ready-made pigments brought to painting. The baseline criteria for painting used to be mimesis (i.e. how "real" the painting looked), but of course photography captures mimetic images in a snap. Photography became the "cheater's" way of making an image and as such was excluded from being "high art" for a very long time. In fact only a few years ago (can't remember if it was 3 or 4 years ago) the awarding of the Tate Gallery's Turner Prize to a photographic work raised eyebrows for that very reason. Around the same time paint in tubes caused a similar, albeit less significant, crisis. Prior to this the painter needed not only the skills to paint a mimetic image, but the knowledge of how to produce the paints themselves. Digital manipulation is seen as "degrading" photography because now those effects that were once the exculsive realm of those technically adept in the darkroom are now available to the rank and file. A lot of what was written between 150 and 75 years ago around the issues of painting vs. photography is becoming extremely relevant again in regards to digital imaging vs. "wet" photography.
So, yeah, it's apples and oranges in one sense, but in another it is not. In the end one is producing an image and there are issues common to all image-making regardless of media such as authorship, aura, craftmanship, composition, beauty, and content.
no subject
Date: 2002-12-16 05:12 am (UTC)Is that Shelly?
"shelly.jpg" Yes, yes it is.
Date: 2002-12-16 05:18 am (UTC)What is pure?
Date: 2002-12-16 11:42 am (UTC)Anything I do is pure. Anything anyone else does is corrupt... *lol* Along with the death of history, the information age has effectively rendered all attempts at rendering any form of image in a pure state, fundamentally meaningless. An image is an image is an image is an image. Media is irrelvant. Media exists only for the artist to capture in a manner that works best for them. Is there any difference in staging a still life model to paint from and photographing the same? Nobody with an active brain cell can come up with an ideological agrgument that holds water. Hell, you could paint it and then I could photograph the painting. Still the same image, the media used is different, that is all. Any claim to "purity" or "immediacy" is nonsense and has no semantic value. Saying that my airbrush work is in any sense more "pure" than a work done in photoshop is pure nonsense, and really only tells my audience that maybe I don't like photoshop. It says nothing about the image.
Why work with an airbrush or any traditional media at all then? Well, all I say is consider the following question:
Have you ever tried to accurately control paint flow and texture with a 15 pixel tip while moving quickly on a 21 inch monitor when your image is over 5000 pixels wide?
Bottom line is that traditional media are somewhat easier to use for some things. That doesn't make them pure - it just makes 'em easy.
Re: What is pure?
Date: 2002-12-16 11:53 am (UTC)Re: What is pure?
Date: 2002-12-16 12:45 pm (UTC)The photograph content would be a combination authorship of you and me. If I divide the total surface area of the photograph by the total surface area covered by your image and then multiply the results by 100 I get how much percent of my photograph is authored by you, and then I do the same for all other images within the surface area of the photo, and assign authorship to those artists... Silly but simple. If 100% of the surface of my photo is your work, then 100% of the photo is authored by you. I become little more than a re-distributor of your work. If I alter the image after photographing it say with photoshop, then the authorship is a function of the delta between images. (untouched photo of object at a given resolution, compared pixel by pixel with retouched photo at that res... etc...)
I would say that if any work is more than 95% one authors work, then by all rights it makes linguistic sense to identify that author as the prime author. The legal definition is 98%...
Authorship is again quite simple. One must merely remove emotion from the issue and examine it from an objective comparison standpoint. This is where the crap that they pound into your head at art school (uggggghhhh... bad memories....) gets in the way. Most artspeak contrary to this is a cover for the fact that the speaker has no artistic ability and instead wants to coast on others work...
Most art is a combination of artists works, and this is nowhere so noticeable as in film. There are set designers, lighting techs, vendors, etc.. Each contribute some small but significant portion to the total authorship of a piece. That is why the film industry does not "Sign" works to individuals. They sign it as a collective company... To some degree any intelligent observer should consider that any art is the same. If you photograph a person on the beach, they bear some authorship in the clothing that they wore, or how they chose to wear makeup, etc... One way or another, there is really no such thing as pure authorship unless you belive in some personalized divine creative force, and then and only then can you ever attribute perfect authorship, and only to that being.
It is for these reasons that most copyright tort is crap and unenforaceble.
Re: What is pure?
Date: 2002-12-16 01:14 pm (UTC)And what of, for example, a photograph of a building? If I was to take a detail picture of a column capitol and a bit of frieze, would not the content of the photograph be 100% the work of the architect and builders? If I can claim authorship of that image how does it differ from taking a close-up detail of someone else's canvas? Or someone else's photograph? And if I take a detail photo of a photo is that not the same as cropping it? So what if I were to crop out a portion of an Ansel Adams and pass it off as my own work?
Re: What is pure?
Date: 2002-12-16 01:57 pm (UTC)Content? Yes...
Just as if I were to photograph the pages of a book. The content of that book is the authors'. Now you could make an argument that as the media is different, then it consitutes a new work of art, but that argument is pretty weak when you compare a didgital stream image to a photograph. The only thing that you could claim it that you have ownership of the process used to create the image of the column, but Kodak would sue your ass off... Bottom line here is that a photograph of anything that you did not create with your own hands implies that the content authorship is not 100% yours. Now, if you built a column, and then photogrphed it...
Now, you could also twist and skew the image with photoshop so that pixel by pixel there is a difference, and then you could say that the photoshop file has been authored by you... You just can't claim content authorship on photos of works done by others without giving them credit. Even our legal system recognizes this. It is illegal to commercially distribute a film that contains advertisments and images that have not been OK'ed by the original authors of that image unless you provide credit to them...
~~ If I can claim authorship of that image how does it differ from taking a close-up detail of someone else's canvas?
You can't reasonably claim ownership of that image's content see above. Content and distribution media are different. I own a CD with a copy of Windows 2000, but I do not own windows 2000, that belongs to microsoft. You could claim ownership of the photograph, but not the content. To assume otherwise in the case of the columns might get you assulated by some burly concrete workers...
~~ Or someone else's photograph?
Recursion! Same rules apply just one recursion deeper...
~~~ detail photo of a photo is that not the same as cropping it?
Physically, yes. Ideologically, no. Same rules apply. There is however a sort of exception here. Should I photograph a book, but zoom in to one letter, the content of the book author's work is no longer there. Probably by the time I zoom to one sentence the same would apply. At the point that I see only one letter, the content is that of the fontographer's work, not mine, not the artists...
It is vitally important to understand that content and delivery of content are distinct concpets. Most artists seem to forget this fact. It is like confusing the milkman with the milk. Once you get that concept straightened out, there really is no confusion over the issue of authorship. Any attempt to find confusion will fall into one of three formal falicies: excluded middle, reducto, or sophistic fallicy. In short, a logical analysis of the situation, dogmatically following the rules of formal logic results in a clear answer to these questions. They are not answers that I necessarily like - I wish I could claim 100% authorship of some of my photos, reasonably though I cannot. I wish I could claim ownership of my copy of windows 2000 so I could redistribute it legally, but I cannot.
~~ So what if I were to crop out a portion of an Ansel Adams and pass it off as my own work?
Ninja's paid by Ansel Adams fans would hunt you down and cut off your head... If there is any way that it can be recognized by a person in a sober state of conscioussness as part of Adams work, then you would be a plagarist unless you gave him credit.
This approach may irk some artists who feel that they have a unique way of seeing, but barring radical surgery to replace the optic nerves and cortext of one person with another so that we can subject this idea to an objective test, I discard it as fanciful thinking.
Now, I need to point out that I invented the colour red. They steal my ideas you know... They can see what I am thinking.... (*smile*).
Re: What is pure?
Date: 2002-12-16 02:28 pm (UTC)Above is a representation of the Empire State Building. Who owns this image? If ownership and authorship differ, how so and where? Include the following:
Me
The current owner of the Empire State Building
The leaseholders within the Empire State Building
The city of New York (which runs the observation deck and certain rights to representations of the building)
The builders of the building
The architect
The people who extracted the raw materials used in the building's construction
The people who shaped the raw materials into the forms used by the builders
The creators of the character set
The creators of HTML
The creators of your operating system
The creators of my operating system
The creators of your browser
The creators of my computer
The company that I work for that owns said computer
The creators of your computer
The builders of said computers
The builders of the individual components of said computers
Livejournal
Everyone else who has photographed, drawn, painted, or otherwise represented this building
King Kong
Above is representation an imaginary weed growing on a ledge of the Empire State building, same questions.
You are missing the point about content vs delivery...
Date: 2002-12-16 05:15 pm (UTC)The architect and the original builders are the ones who provided the content, and perhaps some of the delivery mechanism (visual look and feel),
but they did not use pipe symbols in the construction, nor did they use ASCII keyboards in the design. In so far as a pile of pipe symbols looks like the empire state building, they have a miniscule contribution to the authorship of that image. Mind you, that image looks like a dildo as well. That means that whatever influence they have has to be shared with dildo manufacturers.
As far as your list goes, ALL of the intermeidaries effect only the DELIVERY mechanism for the artwork in question. They have no bearing on the content ownership at all. They are MEDIA providers - paint and canvas if you will. They do not have any ownership of your content any more than your tube of red paint has ownership over a red dot that you paint.
CONTENT VS DELIEVRY
Content Delivery never implies authorship. Never ever ever ever ever. The newspaper's sports section is not hockey. The milkman is not the milk. The letters are not the book.
Content is the arrangement of media. Some media may individually be works of art in themselves, but that does not mean that the creators of a really spectacular glow paint that is interesting by itself have any authorship over what is done with the paint. Someone designs a bottle for holding tequila, but I choose to use the bottle to pound in a nail, that does not mean that the creators of the bottle pounded in the nail. To reason that way is to fall into the fallicy of the excluded middle. The map is not the terrain.
Others have represented the building, yes. Does their version of it imply that they have content authorship in your ASCII art? No. Of course not. I happen to have on two different sox right now, because my feet are cold and all of my other sox are in the wash. My sox have no causal connection to each other. Just because I wore a black sock on my right foot, does not mean that it caused a grey sock to appear on my left foot. There is a precursor cause to both. It was cold, so I put on the only sox I could find. The precusor condition is cold. Not sox.
The same goes for depictions of the building. The precursor to the building representations (all of them) is the building itself, and fundamentally only the architect and builders of that building inform the content of any representation of them. Again, this is simple reasoning.
In so far as your picture is authored or its content is owned by the architect behind the empire state building? I'd say that as rough guess they are responsible for about 1/1,000,000,000 th the credit for that little bit of ascii art.
I did that on purpose
Date: 2002-12-16 06:09 pm (UTC)So what of the choices made in mediating the media used. How does my choice of photography over paint, or acylic paint over oil affect my role as author?
Re: I did that on purpose
Date: 2002-12-17 09:39 am (UTC)I don't really think it does. It may inform the process used to capture content, but it doesn't effect your role as an author. Does the fact that I type this with a keyboard instead of using voice rec or pen and paper effect my authorship of this question? I don't think so. I know that a lot of people feel that for some reason that painting is more legitamately art than photogrpahy, but a lot of people belive some very silly things. It doesn't make them true.
"Even if a lot of people belive a silly thing, it remains a silly thing" -- Oscar Wilde.
All I can say is that it may make capturing your content easier or harder depending on various factors. Does it effect authorship? No, not really. If I paint a perfect replica of a van gogh, or I photograph it, the author credit should still be 99.9% van gogh. Perhaps that is not reflected in the commercial value, but I'd hate it if my prints of Klimt cost just as much to buy as the origianls! And, I for one don't think that my print of "The Kiss" was authored by "Media Images Inc." of North Carolina.
So, I'd have to say that reasonably speaking, media does not effect authorship.
My two cents...
Conclusion (part 1 of 2)
Date: 2002-12-17 01:23 pm (UTC)Ultimately, I suppose you could argue that it is the photons hitting the viewer's retina that are the visual content and that the *only* medium is that light. The author's role in visual media is defining what surfaces are going to reflect or generate different levels of light.
Conclustion (part 2 of 2)
Date: 2002-12-17 01:23 pm (UTC)By the same token any reproduction of an image that results in a significantly similar perception of photons in the viewer's eye could be considered plagurism. A recognizable post-card reproduction of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" represents an incursion on the authorship of the original image because the viewer's visual experience of the postcard is significantly similar to the visual experience of viewing the orginal work. An microscopic image of the surface of the painting is but an insignificant portion of a viewer's experience of the painting and a unique visual experience of its own, not unlike the photograph of the building, and would therefore constitute a unique image with a distinct author other than Van Gogh. Conversely the insignifcant inclusion of the image (say a postcard reproduction of the painting on a rack in front of a store in a photograph of the store itself) in another image such that the Van Gogh is unrecognisable and insignificant use of the image authored by Van Gogh and also represents a new, unique image of discreet authorship. If, however, you painted a perfect forgery then the experience would be even closer to the orginal Van Goth than the post-card and would therefore be clearly plagurism of the visual experience authored by Van Gogh, despite the skill and cunning involved in the creation of the forgery.
I think this fully incorporates your premise that while authorship is never pure, it is quanitfiable, and is a more satifactory criteria for that quantification. Unless you have any critiques of this I'm pretty happy with this conclusion.
Re: What is pure?
Date: 2002-12-16 03:57 pm (UTC)Ahh.. but a DIRECTOR has ALL the creative say .. he can tell a DOP to change the lighting. He can tell the set decorator to redo it
he can tell wardrobe that Sharon Stone doesn't look slutty enough ,
he can tell the editor to use certain shots and he can tell the sound designer to use Classical Music during the chase scene instead of Banjo music.
The Director is the one who pute is all together... That is why when they describe a movie .. it is usually with the directors name
Kubrics -Clockwork orange
Speilbergs -ET
Lynchs Blue -Velevet
Tim Burtons- A nightmare before christmas.
no subject
Date: 2002-12-16 12:26 pm (UTC)or in the computer it makes no difference. It's digital manipulation that is unavalable to traditional photography.
(unless you can acheive the same effect through lighting exposure
and film sensativity)
As far as purity.. I would say its not pure tradtional photography
but that doesn't mean it's not pure photography.
How would you define photography... taking snapshots of what you see ? or showing people what you want them to see? If you have to manipulate the image (throught lens, filter,lighting,exposure OR digital) then ultimately the image is not truly what you saw SO the
purity of work will rely on how close the final product will be to what you envisioned.
Btw .. I really like the pic.
no subject
Date: 2002-12-16 12:44 pm (UTC)Like Lung says, apples and oranges... but yeah, how do you define photography? In conventionaly usage it's tough to draw the line between what is traditionally photography and what can be done in the digital realm. Problem is a precise definition would just amount to generally useless jargon of merit only to those privy to the nuances of the definition. It'd be the visual equivalent to arguing over whether band-X was post-punk-darkwave-electronica or pre-ebm-goth/synthpop-fusion.
no subject
Date: 2002-12-16 02:38 pm (UTC)from these discussions is-
... it's ALL manipulation.
The very act of taking the picture is artifictial
standing in an unatural way to get the right natural lighting
and field , distance, even before the exposure , lens and focus adjustment before the development, before the modification of lighting, and before digital editing.
The only way I can think of it get a 100% unaltered photo is
to take the retnas from the back of the eyes of a corpse to
capture the last image they ever saw.
no subject
There you go. That is my point exactly. Now comes the question of authorship. If it is all manipulation, whose manipulation "counts"?
whose manipulation "counts"?
Date: 2002-12-16 03:13 pm (UTC)I understand art is not black and white but shades of grey.
But in classification we need a definitive limited range of greys
from wich to draw description.
Rephrasing the question
Date: 2002-12-16 03:28 pm (UTC)Re: Rephrasing the question
Date: 2002-12-16 03:44 pm (UTC)do the tools become too simple to use and does the artist cease to become the creator and becomes just another media through wich the work self represents?
Re: Rephrasing the question
Date: 2002-12-16 05:06 pm (UTC)It's not the tool, it's how well the tool is used. And just as the focus of painting shifted away from those things that are more easily and better done with photography, I'm certain we will see photography shift away from those things that are more easily and better done digitally.
So, even more precisely, what differentiates the "snap shot" from an artful photograph? Certainly not the equipment (i.e. the tools). A lot of people take perfectly dreadful snapshots with to-die-for high-end cameras. Likewise I've seen some perfectly brilliant photographs taken with fixed-focus 110 instamatics.
no subject
Date: 2002-12-16 05:14 pm (UTC)I agree .. except I think the word 'well' is relative
I like that pic of Shelly, some might find the high ontrast assaulting.
I say well done.. some others would not.
Whoops
Date: 2002-12-16 12:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-12-16 09:59 pm (UTC)Peace