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Volume
II
Issue 12 April 2000 |
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Kristin
Redpath
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Art and
Technology [Part Four]
Let me make a confession. When I asked what the subject of this newsletter was to be, so I could try to fit this piece with the theme, I read the answer too quickly. Instead of remembering the subject as "improvisation," I remembered it as "imagination." However, since improvisation is not possible without imagination, I justify the following paragraphs. So, now that I’ve confessed and feel much better, on to the point. Almost everyone has an imagination, no matter how deeply buried. I say "almost" because there are those (and I have observed some) who, by tragic accident of birth or accident in life, are unable to imagine. They can be productive, but they cannot be creative, no matter what tools we give them. How very sad that is! The tools of technology allow those of us whose imaginations exist but are perhaps stifled by the logical pragmatism of everyday society and the very pressing need to earn a living, provide for our families, and so forth to express ourselves creatively. Certainly conventional two-dimensional art - drawing and painting - cannot be produced by everyone, no matter how imaginative the person may be. As we insert more and more technology between our brains and the final creative output, more and more of us are able to free our imaginations. I have referred previously to students in my computer graphics classes who began the semester thinking they were not creative and finished realizing they could be. Give a person a computer and she may be productive; teach her to use a computer and she may be creative! Interesting to me are the comments of some of the greatest minds on the subject of creativity and imagination: Man’s mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.
Imaginary
landscape: Daybreak, water color, 20th Century For centuries, artists spent hours and days and years observing nature, trying to represent it accurately. They "discovered" perspective, vanishing point, light source, shading and shadow, and the other principles taught today in art classes and that anyone who draws or paints, even if only on Sunday, is aware of. And all (roughly, as time goes) of these discoveries were made somewhat before or around the same time that scientists and mathematicians defined the principles of physics that applied to the same observations. Today, especially compared with past centuries, science is moving at the speed of light, relativity [sic] speaking, that is. So, after all that time spent trying to figure out how to represent three-dimensional reality on two-dimensional surfaces, somewhere around the time the camera was available (in the early Nineteenth Century or thereabouts), artists started painting and drawing and otherwise creating acceptable imaginative art again. I say "acceptable" because, first, creating from the imagination never stopped in recorded or pre-history, neither in storytelling nor in pictorial art; and, second, because between the Renaissance and the approval of Impressionism as a school of painting, much of the two-dimensional art was, if I recall correctly from my long-ago college art history classes, an attempt at realism. So, why was that? Well, in the first
place, artists have to eat and otherwise provide for themselves
and their families. So, whatever the artist wanted to sell had to
be what the customer wanted to buy, or else the buyer wouldn’t
pay and the artist wouldn’t eat. That doesn’t mean lots
of artists didn’t starve, and it doesn’t mean that artists
who did salable work didn’t give in to their own imaginations
in their spare time. But it does mean that artists whose works have
survived as prime examples of the Neoclassic, Romantic, and other
periods between the Renaissance and Impressionism worked principally
in terms of realism. (I realize I’m making some huge generalizations
here. For example, one of my personal favorites, Joseph Mallord
William Turner, was painting in a muted, watery, atmospheric style
by the end of the Eighteenth Century. I suspect that practically
everyone who reads this will be able to come up with an exception.) 
Imaginary
creature: Gargoyle. So, I’m going to skip Pointillism, Impressionism, and the painting styles that followed, despite their importance, and jump to the next obvious technological development that was adapted by the artist - the camera. The first camera, called the camera obscura, was a dark room with a tiny hole in one wall through which an image was projected, blurred and inverted, onto the opposite wall. It is debatable when the first camera obscura was used - perhaps as early as the Third Century BCE. Roger Bacon was aware of it around 1300 CE, and Hassan ibn Hassan (Ibn al Haitan) wrote of it in the Tenth Century. Regardless of who invented it, artists used the resulting image to sketch the details of objects or scenes. In 1826, Joseph Niépce (1765-1833) successfully made the first permanent photograph, of the courtyard of his own house, using a bitumen-coated pewter plate exposed in a camera obscura. Louis Daguerre (1789-1851), originally a highly regarded operatic scene painter and inventor of the diorama, began collaborating with Niépce around 1829. After Niépce’s death, Daguerre continued experimenting until he perfected the process in 1839, calling his development the daguerreotype. The daguerreotype was an image made on copper plates, coated with silver, sensitized with iodine fumes, and made permanent using a salt solution - messy. Daguerreotypes also required intense lighting using flash powder - dangerous, particularly to the eyebrows, if mishandled. Improvements to the daguerreotype were, of course, dependent on the technology of the time. At first, exposure time was up to thirty minutes, requiring the subject to remain absolutely still for that length of time to avoid blurring the exposure. (There are few, if any, early daguerreotypes of children or animals.) However, improvements in the technology reduced the exposure time. So, by the early 1840s, portrait studios existed in most major European towns, and traveling photographers passed through the smaller towns and villages regularly. The primary drawback of the daguerreotype, other than the exposure time, was the inability to make reproductions from it. Each exposure was unique. Today, with our digital ability to duplicate and change images, an irreproducible, unalterable image could be highly desirable. However, at that time, making more than one identical image was the goal, first reached by British scientist William Henry Fox Talbot, who called his invention the calotype. With the calotype, any number of positive images could be made from a single negative image. Both of these disappeared by the mid-1850s with the development of another process, which used a coating called collodion on glass, and which combined the best features of each.
Since then, many, many photographic processes have been developed. If you would like to learn about them, please refer to the Resources section at the end of the article. Enough about technology; let’s get to the art part. In the United States, the Civil War photographs of Matthew Brady made photography an instrument of the mass media. From about that time until the last decade of the Nineteenth Century, photography was a tool for the portraitist and the same criteria were applied to judging photographic portraits as were applied to drawn and painted portraits on paper and canvas. It became common to tint and retouch photographs to make them look more like paintings. Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936), a Cuban-born English writer and photographer whose early education was in medicine and science, used photography at first to document the natural world. (See the Resources section for Emerson’s photography.) In his treatise, Naturalistic Photography (1889), he criticized the stilted, staged, artificial style of photography popular at the time, concluding that photography should be regarded as an art form independent from all others and that the camera is the tool of the photographic artist, as the brush and canvas are for the painter. However, Emerson also adamantly asserted that a photographic image should not be manipulated artificially in any way beyond naturally occurring variables, such as light and other atmospheric conditions, and the photographer’s intention as to the use of the camera, such as framing and focus. Thus, putting a diamond brooch on a cat and taking its photograph while it’s sleeping would be an impermissible manipulation of nature (since a cat would never sleep in its diamonds). It is interesting to note that only two years later, in 1891 Emerson published his own repudiation of his ideas in another treatise called The Death of Naturalistic Photography, where he stated that, after all, the photographer-artist should be allowed to contrive and design with photographic images. In his reissue of Naturalistic Photography in 1898, the final chapter was changed from "Photography: A Pictorial Art" to "Photography - Not an Art." Emerson continued, throughout his life, to redefine his theories regarding photography and art, pioneering and participating in the debate that continues into the present: Is replication of nature, through photography, art? Ultimately, Emerson concluded it was not. Ironically, in 1887, Emerson awarded a prize for amateur photography to Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1936), a young American photographer whose pictures fell into the category of unmanipulated images that Emerson himself advocated. But, in 1902 Stieglitz founded the Photo-Secession movement, the goal of which was to dignify and advocate photography as an art form. In the early Twentieth Century, the Dadaist and Surrealist movements liberated photographers from representing only the natural world without enhancement. Examples are found in the work of László Moholy-Nagy (Hungary) and Man Ray (USA). 
Imaginary
creatures: Griffons rampant, probably from a heraldic device. At roughly the same time, a group that called itself f/64 (f/64 is an aperture setting on a camera lens that increases depth of field), including Edward Weston (1886-1958), Ansel Adams (1902-1984), and Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976), began producing ultra-realistic photographs. They were exploring the effects of light on natural objects, including faces, by using the capabilities of the camera to bring objects, particularly distant ones, into extra-sharp focus. Adams’ photographs of the natural beauty of the American West are well known. Weston and Cunningham, less well known but also distinguished, primarily photographed natural forms in the abstract (see Resources). As some schools of painting during the Twentieth Century have become more abstract and introspective, advocating more personal expressions of emotion, so have some schools of photography. Experimentation with extremes in photographic styles has paralleled trends in painting. Composites, multiple images, and multiple exposures of the same image correspond to trends in other two-dimensional art forms. In the Neorealist and Neoexpressionist schools of modern art, actual photographs have been incorporated into paintings. Not everyone agrees that photography can be art. We are all aware of the controversy surrounding the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, for example. It is easier to define art when it is created directly with the human hand (whether the art is good or bad or somewhere in between is irrelevant); but how is art defined when a technological development, such as the camera, inserts itself between the artist and the final work?  Image:
Sand Plant: A Study in Black and White. It is the eye and mind that control the camera and decide what to photograph. But, there is an enormous difference between a snapshot of the kids at Disney World and a carefully planned study of a face lined by age and tempered by wisdom. While our snapshots may, occasionally, fulfill the technical definition of "art" (composition, light and shadow, and so forth), the motive in snapping the picture is to record rather than to create. Photojournalism falls into this category, even though many examples of news photographs taken to document also inspire strong emotion. Who can forget the unplanned photograph of a fireman carrying a tiny body from the ruins of the Oklahoma City bombing disaster! That horrifying image is seared into many of our memories &endash; emotion-provoking, heart-wrenching, but not art. When a photograph is planned by a human eye and mind to produce a deliberate result, it can be called art. It is the artist’s intention that creates the art, not the tools used to make it. Photographic art is subjective, as is all art. (I submit that there cannot be objective art. Other than that, again, I make no differentiation here between "good" and "bad" art.) When the artist manipulates the camera, the lighting, the positioning of the subject, then art is possible. When the artist waits for the perfect natural lighting, the exact season, the precise degree of bloom of a flower, the critical instant that a drop of water falls from a leaf and catches the light of the setting sun in its prism, there can be art. When the camera settings, the development of the film, and the printing process are adjusted to achieve the envisioned result, there can be art. When the photographer deliberately reveals character or emotion, there can be art. When a subject is seen by the observer of a photograph, not as it is, but as the photographer wants it to be, there can be art. When light is sharpened or diffused by the manipulation of the lens, and when color is changed, brightened, or dimmed by the use of filters, there can be art. When common objects take on a brilliance or a glamour or an eeriness that is revealed only by the photographer, there can be art. There is art in nature only when revealed by the mind and hand of the artist. Were I to go to Yosemite, for example, to observe its natural beauty, I am not observing human art. Whatever mind or hand may have created the universe, the beauty of it is the Creator’s art. Human art is created by human minds, and there will always be disputes over what human art really is. The moving photographs we call film or movies are optical illusions created by projecting still photographs in rapid succession. Likewise, the television pictures we take for granted are the same. Now, we can, in reverse, capture individual frames of these moving pictures to create still pictures. Then we can manipulate the stills to the point where the original is unrecognizable. Naturally, we need the right technological tools - video cameras, scanners, digital cameras, computers, photo manipulation software, video capture cards, etc., etc., etc. Complicated? Yes! Expensive? You bet! Unnecessary? Maybe. Fun? Definitely! While there is considerable opportunity for deception in the manipulation of photographs, there is also considerable opportunity for creativity, and creativity is not to be stifled, ever. At this point, I call your attention to the last of the quotations in the early paragraphs of this paper: M. C. Escher said, "Every artist paints himself." M.C. Escher’s ( 1898-1972) work, particularly after 1937, is the result of his exploration of his own imagination. A true graphic artist, he explored the fantastic while experimenting with multiple technologies - woodcut, wood etching, and lithograph. In many of his later works, such as Bonifacio, Corsica, Coast of Amalfi, and Castrovalva, he represents space from many different angles simultaneously. Castrovalva permits the viewer to look up into the clouds, down into the valley, and toward the distant mountains - all at the same time. One of his most well known works, Other World, a three-color wood engraving dated 1947, shows three views of real space using traditional perspective, each of which is logical and linked in a realistic way but which, as a whole, could never exist in reality as perceived by human beings. In Drawing Hands, each of two almost photographically realistic hands is drawn drawing the other hand while the viewer looks down on a piece of paper on which the hands are in the process of drawing each other. Fascinating. Escher was not a highly regarded artist in his own time. Now, as then, his work deserves far more attention than I have given it in these few paragraphs. If you are unfamiliar with it, I urge you to view some of Escher's work at the sites listed in the Resources section. However, as a segue to the final installment of this series, it is interesting to note that the progression of his work from basically realistic (pre-1937) to fantastic (post-1937 until his death) parallels society’s transitions. The transition embodied in Escher’s work over his long life is a microcosm of what society has been experiencing over a much longer period, from the realistic painting style of, say, the French Neoclassical school to today’s virtual worlds. Open a newspaper or magazine, and you will see something, perhaps an advertisement, created with a computer. Even people who do not own computers and want to know nothing about them are influenced by them in ways they do not recognize. It is difficult to name revolutions when they first begin, but I know no one who would insist now that the computer has not changed the world as human beings perceive it. 
Imaginary
creature: Turtle, Like the camera, the computer can manipulate images without direct human touch. Like the camera, the computer has evolved, during the lifetime of most of us, from a tool used to calculate to a medium for artistic expression. Like a photograph, a work of art created with the computer is dependent on the eye and mind of the artist. We live in a time, right now, when the debate quietly rages: Is art made with a computer, art? Are fractals art? What about morphing? Can a computer create art without human intervention of any kind? We shall find out, perhaps sooner than we expect. In the final installment, I will explore some of the possibilities. Resources: Photojournalism: Locate many sites
on Photojournalism by using the following search: Photography "How To": http://www.startext.net/photos/phototopics.htm Camera Obscura: http://brightbytes.com/cosite/what.html And there are many others. A web search for Camera Obscura will yield hundreds of results. For a commentary on the alleged use of optical devices by Sixteenth-Century Europe's master painters, see Alberta Moraine's article in Issue 10 of the Newsletter, Memo to the World: Smoke and Mirrors. Joseph Niepce and Louis Daguerre: http://www.art.uiuc.edu/ludgate/the/place/soapbox/spe/backgro
und.html Neoclassicism and Romanticism: http://www.prenhallart.com/html/search/period/4_1.htm Cinematography: Photographers of Note: http://www.execpc.com/~torrey/notefoto.html (this is just a list with brief description of each, but good starting point for research) William Henry Fox Talbot: http://www.r-cube.co.uk/fox-talbot/ Collodion: http://www.collodion.org/ Matthew Brady: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ihas/icon/brady.html Peter Henry Emerson: http://www.kbnet.co.uk/rleggat/photo/history/emerson.htm Alfred Stieglitz: http://masters-of-photography.com/S/stieglitz/stieglitz.html Photo Secessionist Movement:
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: http://masters-of-photography.com/M/moholy-nagy/moholy-nagy.h tml Man Ray: http://www.manraytrust.com/ Museums, Collections and Exhibits American Museum
of Photography: International Museum of Photography and Film (George Eastman House): http://www.eastman.org/ University of
Arizona: Historical and
Genealogical photos: Links to Works of Photo Masters: http://www.masters-of-photography.com/ (view works of Adams, Stieglitz, Moholy-Nagy, Weston, and others not mentioned in article) Selected Photographic Art: http://www.mastersofphotography.com/ (this site changes from time to time, but you can view some nice work) Photohistory: Japan 1646-present: 19th Century Stereoviews: Photomicrography: Snowflakes of
Wilson Bentley: Butterflies: Women in Photography: http://www.sla.purdue.edu/WAAW/Palmquist/index.htm Imogen Cunningham: Biography:
http://www.adamsgallery.com/artists/bio/imogen.html Landscape Photography: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/table_of_contents.htm (site with many links to some quite nice photography) Falsifying Photographs: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98may/photo.htm (article from Atlantic Monthly in 3 parts; part 1 at this site) Group f/64: http://www.slonet.org/~dkrehbie/1intro/f64.htm Ansel Adams: Gallery of 16
images: http://www.sausagenet.com/adams/ Web search for Ansel Adams yields hundreds of sites, many offering prints for sale, but photos can be viewed. M.C. Escher: Work can be viewed at sites below. Again, many also offer prints for sale. Web search yields many more sites. http://www.djmurphy.demon.co.uk/escher.htm Edward Weston: http://masters-of-photography.com/W/weston/weston.html 
Imaginary
creatures (family grouping): Grotesque Animals.
About the Author: Kristin Redpath is Professor Emeritus of Computer Technology, Massasoit Community College, Brockton, Massachusetts, with a Master's Degree in Theater Education, as well as additional graduate study in theater, education and computer science. She combined her love of teaching, computers, and the arts with business skills in 1984 as an adjunct, then full time, professor of Computer Information Systems at Massasoit Community College. She served as Chair of the Computer Information Systems Department from 1988 through 1994, received tenure in 1990 and the rank of full Professor in 1991. Before retiring (early) in August, 1999, she also served as President of Massasoit's Academic Senate. She is currently at work on a textbook on introductory computer graphics and is investigating the feasibility of making her own technical training CD's. Also a watercolorist and singer, she views retirement as a new beginning. Married, with a grown son, she lives in the picturesque (Wheaton) college town of Norton, Massachusetts, and never wants to live permanently anywhere but in a small, New England college town.
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