Every image is an artifice however much we think it is documentary.
David Hockney
We typically think of photographs as somehow being ‘true’, as being a real representation of what the photographer saw. In practice of course photographers have always manipulated reality from the earliest days. Some, like Oscar Reijlander constructed elaborate collages depicting mythological scenes. Others like Angus McBean brought surrealism to the medium while Man Ray used extreme processing methods like solarisation to generate new visions. All met with some hostility from ‘traditionalists’ before being absorbed and accepted as part of the aesthetic of photography.
This tradition is being continued with digital imaging. Everything that has been done with film can be duplicated in digital form, but new tools are also being developed, offering new opportunities and new ways of seeing the world. The technology is still new and rapidly developing. Much of the art world has yet to meet and understand its potential. So far there is no commonly accepted aesthetic response to the characteristic feel of digital images and it is exploring this aspect that most interests me.
I work with my own and found photographs, combining them digitally and sometimes physically, before further manipulating and distorting them. I often draw on the image using a graphics tablet. The final product is however always a physical print.
One would expect that working digitally would be in some way precise and perhaps rigid. My experience is however very different. The shape and form of the final image seems to depend as much on some intangible qualities of the original photographs as on any work I do and initially similar images often end up with very different outcomes. Eventually however an image does emerge – sometimes after a long and complex process, sometimes after only the briefest touch. For my part I continue to explore – and to be surprised by what appears.
[This is a modified version of a statement I prepared some time ago for a show in which I had some digital prints. I don't do so much digital work as I used to, but it still represents I think, the way I feel about the medium.]
