Luckily for my wise and erudite audience, Mike C. has written an actually interesting piece, which if you have not yet read (and why not? Hmm?) you ought to read. It's the sort of thing I aspire to write when I am not consumed with fits
of bile, and he makes a most excellent case for collage and related forms that begin with photographs and end up somewhere else.
Since this is very much a Thing (especially if we add in, which Mike doesn't, your basic "heavily photoshopped thing that look like a photograph but isn't any more") it's worth a good think and a spirited defense.
before I go and read Mike C's thing (well, and before that I need to go and get my groceries), I want to say that I've been thinking that maybe (some) heavily photo-shopped things are actually what we see. A photograph is too brutal, too exact, the eye/brain combo ignores the plop of bird-shit, the athlete's grotesque grimace of effort, the electric lines...
ReplyDeleteperhaps I'll develop the idea more later, dig out my notes... basically, almost NO photographs represent what we see... no, they don't represent what we PERCEIVE, which is what it's all about...
I think you are absolutely correct. During the film days, I finally came around to the conclusion that pinhole and Krappy Kamera photos actually much better expressed the way I saw the world, especially as I was getting older and my eyes weren't what they used to be. I think the 'straight' photography propaganda has been much too powerful in the photo community. Frankly, things like Todd Hido's "#no filter" posts make me gag.
DeleteThanks for the link, Andrew, though I've a feeling your readers and my readers may be to a large extent co-extensive... Yes, both of them!
ReplyDeleteMike
Mike