Layers: looking at photography and photoshop - Features - Evaluation

Afterimage, July-August, 2002 by Are Flagan

BACKGROUND

Despite the conjunctive statement in the title of this essay, there is currently an ontological dividing line between photographs and images spawned by Photoshop. Apart from tracing the outlines of different technologies, this contested line circumscribes the divide between analog and digital manifestations of photographic representations. The crucial difference between the two has often, and quite dramatically, been construed as a matter of life and death--one is slipping into darkness; the other is seeing the light. The sources and causes of these morbid concerns have of course already been explored to their own finitude. With digital imaging the material transparency that allowed for objective views across time and space met an opaque surface in the form of a manipulable array of pixels. There was much talk of a reconfigured eye," (1) as if our natural vision had viscerally been gauged out of its sockets and replaced by prosthetic sight, incapable of making the contrasting distinction necessary to see with the same decisive clarity. Blinded by this technological shift and thereby destined to grope around in uncertainties, what may be termed a "reconfigured mind" also emerged; a new reality was quickly decoded from the technical adjustments to our retinal impressions. Incessantly opaque and self-referential, the new photograph, invariably brought to you via Adobe Photoshop after its February 1990 launch, became a perplexing hybrid--an indexical imprint of the world that had no corresponding shape in reality. (2)

But if there was, or is, no crossing of this impossible divide, this conclusive matter of life and death, why did the splash screen of Photoshop introduce itself, when it first arrived, with an icon that put users eye to eye with another paradigm advertised through seeing? And why is the optical nerve still offered a reciprocal view in version 7.0, after several innovative makeovers? If the shift from an optical and lens-based to a digital culture truly amounted to a leap from dark to light with no twilight in between, as it has been suggested, why would every launch choose to look back from this brave new world with what it dismisses as hindsight? It appears, at first sight and second thought, that this software application is invested in negotiating the same analogies of vision that also equates the photographic apparatus with an eye. Seen together they may very well compose an odd stereoscopic pair of added depth and dimensionality. To achieve this effect it is necessary to layer some sidelong glances and perpendicular views, invoking a horizontal stacking of photography and Photoshop rather than a vertical divide.

LAYER 1

One of the very first accounts of looking at photographs, in this case a daguerreotype of Boulevard du Temple in Paris, came from an American, Samuel F. B. Morse. Meeting with Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre on March 7, 1839, (3) he wrote his family shortly thereafter to express his first lingering impressions:

You cannot imagine how exquisite is the fine detail portrayed. No painting or engraving could ever hope to touch it. For example, when looking over a street one might notice a distant advertisement hoarding and be aware of the existence of lines or letters, without being able to read these tiny signs with the naked eye. With the help of a hand lens, pointed at this detail, each letter became perfectly and clearly visible, and it was the same thing for the tiny cracks on the walls of buildings or the pavements of the street. (4)

What struck Morse and other early observers most was the unique precision of the daguerreotype image; its ability to represent the tiniest detail with such delicate clarity. In his descriptive experience or looking Morse even resorted to the use of a hand lens, serving as a magnifying glass, to examine each element closely and marvel at the resolving resolution--"each letter became perfectly and clearly visible." Morse seemed far less concerned about explicating the index of this newfound reality, at least with some measure of scale and ratio intact, than "looking over a street," as if he was somehow moving around inside the image and intimately exploring its internal architecture. His "naked eye" was airily levitating across the rooftops and chimneys before it turned pedestrian and crossed the street with an optical aid to read the hoarding. He even bent over, as he would if strolling the boulevard itself, to peruse the inconsequential cracks that miraculously belonged to the brick and mortar of buildings, t o the image itself, rather than a glitch in the silver iodide, revealing the copper plate beneath. The closer Morse got in his ocular wanderings, the greater the clarity on display.

If we slowly retrace this visionary path, it appears that looking turned from a general overview--exemplified in his account by the unfavorable touch of painting or engraving where the brush or needle would quickly assert its mark-to a condensed and slowed pace of visualization that dwelled on details; distinct and minute elements of the picture that were breaking into what seemed like infinite fractals under the power of a hand lens. Zooming in and zooming out, switching between micro and macro views, Morse traversed this new complexity in a manner that reveals the photograph as a space comprised of hierarchical layers of information, not a simple recognition of flat, analog equivalence. Morse does not only see the street from above--he eagerly crosses it to the hoarding, the letters and their cracks. In the process, photography unveils an amazing depth that can only be discerned by breaking the whole into distinct pieces, while one retains a realistic overview for comparison and classification.