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On Art and Technology: When Seeing
is Not Believing
An essay dealing with mechanical aids to visual art from Camera Obscura
to Computers
http://www.howarddavidjohnson.com/pencil.htm
When the camera was finally made commercially available in the 1830's it
exploded on the world scene and sent shockwaves through the art world as history
had never seen before. Visual artists all over the world were suddenly put out
of work and resentment and outrage followed. Suddenly much more realistic
portraits could be had at a tiny fraction of the cost of a painting and
delivered almost instantly. The art world would never be the same. When motion
picture cameras were new, seeing was believing and human consciousness changed
forever in the 20th century. Sometimes even Terror and Panic came from the
initial shock! In 1905 cinema patrons defecated and urinated in their seats as
they broke each other's arms and legs desperately fleeing for their lives from a
crowded theater to escape a train charging straight for them! ... train footage
filmed safely from a bridge with a camera lowered down on a rope. A modern
cinema patron would not even feel uncomfortable. The Photograph and its
manipulations have changed human consciousness and history... and will continue
to do so in the future.
* The Camera has changed everything.
The Camera of Today owes it's origin to the Camera Obscura, a light- tight box
with a lense and a screen that receives an image. This device has been used by
artists since ancient times to trace the projected image of whatever they set
before it on a screen. Intrigued by the idea of producing a permanent
light-formed image instead of reproducing it by hand, a long line of inventors
studied the problem and successively made contributions to the solution.
Photography was neither discovered nor invented by any one man. It was the
outcome of the early observations of the alchemists and chemists on the action
of light, a subject that belongs strictly to the domain of photochemistry.
Although the blackening of silver salts was known in 1565, it was not until
1727, when Johann Heinrich Shulze of Germany used a mixture of silver nitrate
and chalk under stenciled letters, that it was definitely recognized that this
darkening action was caused by light and not by heat. In the years that followed
experiments with silver nitrate on leather and wood were successful. In 1817 J.
Nicephore Niepce first tried photography with silver nitrate and paper. In 1826,
L.J.M. Daguerre, a painter who had experimented with silver salts approached him
and formed a partnership.
Daguerre discovered accidentally that that the effect produced by exposing an
iodized silver plate in a camera would result in an image if the plate were
fumed with mercury vapor. The Daguerreotype process was a complete success.
These chemical processes would be improved again and again until the advent of
the digital camera we know today. The attitude that Photography was not art and
was a purely mechanical process requiring no talent whatsoever was put forth
with great force and hostility in an attempt to get people to refrain from
choosing it for their portraits instead of paintings. This is a typical reaction
to new technology, when Pastels were first invented they were dismissed as a
child's plaything rather than a viable art medium. These attacks on new
technology are not limited to the arts of course. When the Wright brothers were
making history at Kitty hawk with the first manned airplane their detractors
said: "If man were meant to fly, he'd have been born with wings." This kind of
negativity is just human nature to some kinds of people.
Photography came into being through an artistic, not a scientific urge. Daguerre
was an artist, a scene painter whose illusionistic diorama was a landmark in
Paris long before his name was connected with photography. Critics were
merciless as usual, with scathing condemnations of the media. However, in the
hands of a sensitive artist, photography quickly showed it's artistic
possibilities. David Octavious Hill, a Scottish Painter invented the camera set
up and the pose as we know them today in the 1840's and was the first of a new
breed of master photographic artists. Photography was here to stay. Diverse
forms of retouching techniques followed both by accident and by design and took
the medium to new levels of artistic excellence. Now, more than a century and a
half later only an uneducated or blindly hateful person would say Photography is
not an art form. Of course we've all seen our share of awful pictures with the
heads cut off taken by amateur photographers but we've also seen the work of
studio masters like the great portrait photographers from Hollywood in the
1930's and forties. Anyone who has tried to create such a sophisticated studio
photograph realizes quickly that this is a very difficult art form to master
even if a trained orangutan can take a bad snapshot with an instant camera made
for children.
The use of Photography as a mechanical aid to traditional oil paintings and
other forms of realistic art came right away. This is not surprising since
artists had been tracing from Camera Obscura for thousands of years. Famous
Myths; Leonardo Da Vinci ( 1452-1519 ) is often credited with the invention of
Camera Obscura because he used it for his masterworks during the Renaissance and
mentioned it in his notebooks, but this is simply not true. Similarly, Americans
are credited with the camera, but it is also not true. Origins: Unlike the
camera, the inventor and time of invention of Camera Obscura are unknown.
Perhaps a crude form of it was known to the ancient Greeks, but there is no
material evidence to substantiate such a point of view. The mathematical
precision and perfect anatomy of Greek art combined with their passionate love
of science and mathematics is testimony enough for many scholars. The earliest
clear description of Camera Obscura occurs in the great optical treatise of the
Islamic scientist Al-Hazen who died at Cairo, Egypt in A.D. 1098. His Opticae
Thesaurus ( Book of optics ) was rendered into Latin sometime during the 12th or
13th century by an unknown translator. Al- Hazen honestly declares that he
himself did not discover it, so we know from this it had to have been
masterminded before A.D. 1098.
* Camera obscura is a device for tracing or sketching large objects. It consists
of a box painted black inside- a mirror at a 45 degree angle , and a lens, like
that used in a photographic camera. An image is thrown on the mirror by the lens
and reflected on the screen, where it can be sketched with tracing paper. The
Camera Obscura was in general use by newspaper and magazine il! lustrators until
it was replaced by the photographic camera. Make no mistake. Professionals have
been using mechanical aids since the first caveman shaman traced his hand out on
the wall of his cave. The view finder on the reflex camera is a development from
Camera Obscura. Camera obscura, interestingly enough, is Latin for "darkened
chamber".
In the early 1600's the telescope came into use and Camera Obscura spared
viewers the harmful effects of gazing directly into the sun. I regret, but that
we must acknowledge the fact that almost every art medium throughout the ages
has been corrupted. In the 2nd century, the Roman emperor Hadrian had the head
of his lunatic predecessor Nero removed from a statue and replaced by that of
his favorite. Much later in 1539, Holbein painted a glamourous and flattering
portrait of Anne of Cleves for Henry VIII. When the future queen arrived in
England, King Henry met the surprisingly less than dazzling and glamorous Anne.
His disappointment made history. Our modern society certainly can't claim t he
honor nor take the blame of being the first to manipulate art forms.
By the 21st century instead of the traditional assistants and apprentices,
artists employed overhead transparency projectors, opaque projectors,
artographs, light tables, slide projectors, color photocopying... and suddenly,
computers and image editing software, which brings us to some very compelling
controversies regarding these modern imaging technologies and their impact on
various media and further changes to human consciousness. For example: The
integrity of Photography as evidence in our courts of law stood for many decades
until it was shattered by the digital manipulation of photographs and new
standards needed to be introduced. Websites sold peeks at photos of celebrities'
heads pasted onto photos of wild women in scandalous poses for all the world to
see- but advertised as real celebrity pix. Scandal rocked television and other
news media when digitally altered photographs were being passed off as reliable
evidence of important news stories...
* On a positive note, no one was threatened by how this technology enabled
motion pictures to do epic things they could only dream of before. They were
supposed to be make-believe images appearing real! A golden era in special
effects cinema ensued. Then, this powerful digital imaging technology, like the
camera, fell into the hands of the common man through computer programs like
Adobe Photoshop. A new culture of skepticism had abandoned the age old adage;
"seeing is believing" Photography has never told the whole truth, just parts of
it. Photography is also an art form and therefore rightfully susceptible to
creative alterations. In addition, the advancement of digital manipulation
technology cannot be undone or halted. I believe that we must recognize that
this digital technology exists on a gigantic-scale, and will never go away.
Therefore, I suggest that digitally altered photos are distinct from traditional
photography, and should be treated as such.
* Contrasting views: anti-manipulation advocates' fear a negative impact of
digital manipulation in a court of law, and pro-manipulation advocates say that
we must wake up to the fact that for for decades pictures have not been reliable
evidence in court and that any good lawyer will attempt to discredit
photographic evidence. In response to claims that photos should always tell the
truth, the pro-manipulation camp would say that photos have never told the
unvarnished truth. A camera shows, and has always only shown, a fraction of
reality, and even then what we see is taken out of context or even fabricated.
Photography from its onset has been subjected to modifications. In 1839, the
Frenchman Louis-Jacques Daguerre patented the daguerreotype, or what could be
called the first "picture." Simply explained, the daguerreotype combined the
usage of the camera obscura and silver iodide to produce a permanent image on a
copper plate. A very exciting innovation, Daguerre boasted of it, "With this
technique, without any knowledge of chemistry or physics, one will be able to
make in a few minutes the most detailed views" ("Photography"). Almost
immediately, the daguerreotype, especially daguerreotype portraits, became
immensely popular. Its popularity, of course, can be attributed to its novelty,
but also because people believed the daguerreotype produced a more real image
than a painting. The general attitude toward the daguerreotype was that it could
create images more realistically because there was no artist to interpret and
modify it in his own style.
* Opponents of Digital Manipulation insist Photography should always represent
the truth, asserting Photography's first and foremost function is to portray
reality. Many assume that photographs have never been manipulated, and that this
recent outbreak in digital technology damages the integrity of photography.
Without delay, anti-manipulation proponents demanded an end to all "dishonest"
photography, as it severely misleads the public. Also, they view digital
manipulation as a purely mechanical process, with no talent or skill involved.
Furthermore, anti-manipulation proponents fear manipulated photos might acquit
murderers or rapists in courts of law. The thought that photography had replaced
painting abounded. "As if photography needed to absolve itself from its
'original sin'--of having brought about the death of painting", a movement known
as pictorialism thrived around 1890-1914, the Art Nouveau period. Proponents of
pictorialism primarily set out to gain the recognition of photography as an art
rather than just a mechanical process. The pictorialists fashioned bizarre and
oddly focused images in order to prove photography was indeed a creative art. It
was here that such concepts as shading and enhancing during development
appeared. Because of these new shadings and angles, it can be said that Art
Nouveau saw the dawn of "Photo manipulation." So the manipulation of photography
actually began early in the the 20th century.
In 1982 there was outrage over the manipulation of the Great Pyramids on the
cover of National Geographic but the Genie was out of the bottle. There was no
going back. In the 1990's Computer programs like Adobe Photoshop began to be
available to the general public. Now, even someone with little or no talent
could produce delightful works. On the other hand, sensitive artists could
produce masterpieces on a scale undreamed of. It seems clear that using this
technology to willfully falsify photographs for slanderous, scandalous, or
persuasive ends is morally wrong, but what about using it to create obvious
unreality that looks real or Fantastical Realism in art as in pictures of
fairies or mythic creatures?
* What is realism? Realism in Art and literature has always meant that the
artist attempts to represent persons, scenes, things, and facts as they are,
life as it is. The word is used in many senses- as opposed to romanticism, to
conventionalism, to sentimentalism, to idealism and to imaginative treatment.
Sometimes it is a term of praise, and sometimes it is a term of derision. During
the 19th and 20th centuries the use of the word realism often implied that the
details brought out were of an unpleasant, sordid, obscene, or generally
offensive character. Even the greatest illustrators of the day were ridiculed.
Realism is commonly applied to a 19th century school of writers and artists; but
realism, in it's prime and proper sense, is as old as art and literature
themselves, but in the hands of it's most notorious exponents, it quickly
degenerated into a connotation of the more sinister features of realism.
Many 20th century contemporary realists and artists working in the Photo Realism
style were trained in an educational system openly hostile or dismissive to
Classical realism and art tradition and were only taught the tenets of
Abstraction and Expressionism. As a result many of these artists are more akin
to the abstract and expressionist schools than the "Classical Realism" of the
ancient Greeks, which adored beauty and nature. Contemporary Realism does not
embrace the math and design of the Classical school but does not frown on
beauty. Photo Realism only strives to look as much like a photograph as possible
and sometimes the results are shocking or disturbing. Other times they are
mundane and so ordinary as to be boring. They often deliberately decline to
select subjects from the natural, beautiful, and harmonious and more especially,
depict ugly things and bring out details of an unsavory sort for social and
political purposes. The real mission of Photo-realism is not to record everyday
life like a Norman Rockwell painting, but to expose the unconscious way we look
at and accept photographs.
* By the 20th century realism had spread to nearly all nations- realistic
elements combined with those of Impressionism, Symbolism, and other movements.
Fantastic Realism on the other hand, is born of these movements and tied to them
in style and technique, but prefers to explore subjects that are strange or
strikingly unusual rather than scenes of everyday life or objects. It is often
bizarre in form, conception and appearance and even wondrous in its beauty.
Sometimes macabre and grotesque, it is rarely boring like the other forms of
Realism in visual art so often are. Fantastic Realism can be completely apart
from reality, yet appearing to be quite real. It is versatile in that it can
combine with or be a part of the Classical, Contemporary or Photo-realistic
schools or stand as a style unique unto itself. I combine elements from all of
these schools of Realism and then take it a step further by also combining a
wide variety of media from traditional oil paintings to today's cutting edge
digital media in my exhibits. Naturally, the darker side human nature shows
itself again with condemnation of new schools of expression, and new art media
and technology. Like the photographers before them, digital artists wanted the
recognition of their work as an art rather than just a mechanical process.
Unlike the snapshot camera or an abstract painting, a trained chimp or orangutan
cannot do it: it takes the same visionary and eye to hand skills as any
traditional art media to do it well.
* Since the times of the ancient Greeks, Art History records a relentless quest
for Realism and artistic excellence. The masters of each generation strove to
perfect their craft, then passed on the torch of their accumulated knowledge and
skill to the next generation.
The accomplishments and technological breakthroughs of one generation have often
set new standards of excellence for the next.
~ Howard David Johnson MMIV
Obscura
The camera obscura is based on a simple principle. If you go into a dark room
(thus the name, the Latin camera, "room", and obscura, "dark") and punch a small
hole in the wall, the image outside will be projected inside. Francis Bacon
understood the apparatus; Da Vinci described them in his notebooks; Frisius and
Kepler used camera obscura projections to help perform their observations of the
sun. The camera obscura became a staple of Victorian seaside resorts; one built
in the 1940s at Cliff House in San Francisco provides a pleasant view of the
elephant seal rocks. Recently, one controversial book suggested that Dutch
master Johannes Vermeer may have used the camera obscura in his art. Certain
hints of the perspective Vermeer used, the physical evidence suggesting that
Vermeer was able to very accurately render objects' proportionally without
measuring them, the apparent finding that many of Vermeer's paintings were made
in the same room, and a tantalizing question of whether one object in a painting
represents Vermeer's darkened booth all piqued architecht Philip Steadman's
interest. The question isn't settled, and it may never be. For one thing, why
wasn't Vermeer's lens, which would have been a rare and quite valuable item,
recorded in his effects when he died? Vermeer, though a master painter and
member of Delft's painters' guild, was primarily an art dealer, and could quite
likely have afforded it, but would it have vanished out of history? But
Steadman's thesis is nothing compared to that of painter and photographer David
Hockney.
Hockney, a major British artist, had been puzzling over portraiture of
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. How did Ingres' small -- often 12 inches by 18
inches -- and quickly drawn portraits have such a confident line? Then, he
recounted in a New Yorker article on his theory, it hit him: "[O]ne morning,
studying the blowups, I found myself thinking, Wait, I've seen that line before.
Where have I seen that line? And suddenly I realized, That's Andy Warhol's
line." Hockney thought that Ingres had been quickly tracing a projected image,
as Warhol did on many of his paintings. Eventually Hockney came to the
conclusion that Ingres had been using a camera lucida ("bright room") to set
down quickly a sketch of key points of the face, and had been concealing his use
of the device. An artist might hide his use of mechanical aids; the nineteenth
century American realist painter Thomas Eakins worked from photographs and took
some pains to conceal the fact.
Hockney worked with the camera lucida, a sort of prism on a stick, to
demonstrate that the technique was viable. Ross Woodrow, a lecturer in art at
Australia's University of Newcastle, strongly disputes Hockney's take on things
(and even what Hockney asserts is the pseudo-photographic nature of his
portraits), but this is a viable approach to demonstrating that a wild theory is
at least a practical wild theory. Thor Heyerdahl may not have proved anything
about Polynesian sailing, but at least he demonstrated that his idea would have
worked. Then, however, Hockney got religion. He started seeing what he felt were
unmistakable signs of the use of advanced optics everywhere; in van Ecyk's work,
in Holbein's The Ambassadors (with its anamorphic skull), in the Mona Lisa. He
began to assert that the entire Renaissance revolution in painting, the
improvement in technique that occured after around 1420, could best be
understood as a revolution in optics. Painters in the Renaissance didn't
necessarily understand perspective better, Hockney argued; they simply had
access to concave mirrors that they could use to project images onto the canvas.
The French biographer and perspective theorist Jean-Francois Niceron (whose work
Marcel Duchamp claimed inspired his own), roughly a contemporary of Vermeer's,
had mused about using the camera obscura as an artist's tool. Vermeer lived near
master lensmaker Antony von Leeuwenhoek. Vermeer was a single painter; if he had
stumbled across an innovative trick using lenses, he might have been able to
keep it hidden. Hockney was forthrightly proposing that there had been centuries
of conspiracy, that Western European painters had passed a secret from one
generation to the next while never revealing it to the outside world; his book
making the argument was called Secret Knowledge. It was enormously controversial
to art historians; a conference on his claims (dubbed a "smackdown" by ArtKrush
magazine) largely featured critics. But art historians weren't simply upset that
they had missed the single most important fact about the Renaissance; in
addition to the fact that Hockney's theory relied upon two hundred years of
artists keeping a secret from the outside world, in the face of strongly-worded
doubts about some of the internal evidence Hockney finds in the paintings he
studied, a complete lack of documentary evidence (Why haven't any of these
mirror apparatuses ever turned up? Leonardo da Vinci recorded his musings about
the camera obscura; why wouldn't he have noted its use in painting in his secret
notebooks? Why didn't any sitters -- or their highly-informed secretaries --
ever mention the use of mirrors in letters?) or even the scant physical evidence
suggesting Vermeer's use of the camera obscura, Stanford professor David Stork
noted that the convex mirrors didn't work. Mirror-making, like lens-making,
simply wasn't advanced enough in the 1400s to provide the features Hockney
claimed he saw in nearly every Renaissance master's work. Some of the oddities
Hockney points to are compellingly weird; it seems likely that at least some
painters used optical techniques more than we realized. But Hockney has become a
conspiracy theorist, and at some point, most conspiracy theorists go beyond mere
fact. They've seen the truth, and everything, even random noise or the absence
of evidence, is another data point proving their claim. True believers don't
have to think about the null hypothesis that there wasn't a two hundred year
tradition of Dutch and Italian painters (painters, that close-mouthed and
conspiracy-minded cabal!) using devices a hundred years too advanced for their
time. He's shining a light into the darkness.
"I was talking with another historian the other day, and he assured me that no
left-handed person would ever have been allowed to become pope in those days:
the left was the devil's hand. Sinistra. But that's the effect you would get, in
the early days of lens projection, if you hadn't yet learned to compensate for
the reversal caused by the lens. For that matter, look through the rest of the
book: Lorenzo Lotto's 'Man with a Golden Paw'; he, too, appears to be holding
the object in his left hand. Doesn't it seem to you there are an inordinate
number of left-handed people in this book?" He paused again before positively
exulting, "I'm right. I'm right. I'm more certain of it every day."
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