From: Shannon Stoney (shannonstoney@earthlink.net)
Date: 07/30/02-08:57:25 AM Z
Janet asked:
. Also, what is the digital aesthetic and
> how is it defined? It seems to me that when students work with the digital
> camera, the idea of the image is so much more disposable and not so precious.
> Perhaps the moment and its importance is some how lost with out the tension
that
> having to capture the image on film creates--that not knowing immediately what
> you have gotten, makes for a less lazy work ethic than the instant playback..
> any one else have thoughts on that?
I have thought about that some. I think you can't really decide ahead of
time what the digital aesthetic, or any aesthetic is, without mucking around
in the medium. Then its aesthetic reveals itself to you.
I did a series last year of digital collages made from digital
photographs. I made one every day for six months, about that day. That is, I
would collect 20-30 images during the day and find a way to collate them at
the end of the day. I set a time limit of about an hour to do this at the
end of the day. For me, my digital aesthetic grew out of the collage
aesthetic I guess. I have a very inexpensive digital camera and its images
are 1.3 megapixels. Therefore if you print out one of the images, it only
looks good at about 4"x5". If you get any bigger than that it looks
terrible. But, if I combined a lot of images, I could make a print 8"x15",
which was the format I settled on, as the collages were mostly landscapes.
I did throw away a lot of images, so the disposable nature of the images was
part of the process. But collage was traditionally about making things out
of bits of found newspaper, mass media images, etc. So making digital
collages out of disposable images fits right into that tradition. Also
sometimes I included images that I scanned from magazines; and I included
text from whatever I was reading. I called it a digital journal, as I tried
to sum up the day in each image.
Using a lot of different images from a lot of different sources and
combining them to make a landscape that was somehow convincing caused a lot
of my images to have a sort of surreal quality. Photomontage and collage of
course has a tradition of being bizarre or surreal (I'm thinking of Hannah
Hoch and Jerry Uelsmann now); Photoshop just makes it easier. Also
Photoshop makes it more painterly, as you can layer things and make them
transparent and fool around with layer effects. New colors and textures
result.
So, for me the digital aesthetic has been ABOUT the disposability and
"cheapness" of the image (no film to buy), the ease of carrying a small,
cheap camera in my pocket everywhere I go, the point and shoot nature of the
camera, the casual, street-photography nature of the photos I took, and the
painterly surrealism of collage in photoshop.
--shannon
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