Is It Photography?
Are images like the butterfly above or below, or this clematis, photography?
Good question. In one sense, they certainly start out as digital captures, so are at least technically digital photographs in origin. And I’m not Photoshop artsy-filter-slap-happy, at least I hope not. Let it be clearly understood that nothing other than the Sharpen > Unsharp Mask Filter was used from the Photoshop Filter menu.
In another sense, a viewer could quite reasonably look at the imagery and would be right in assuming that non-photographic techniques are involved. The clematis in particular looks more like painting than photography to me.
Here’s where I come out. A good question, but ultimately it may not matter much what an image is, provided the image works visually. But if I had to say, I’d say these images are a new media, part photography part something new, and part of the evolution of digital photography into a new art form. (Drum roll, please!)
View this image larger.
October 16th, 2006 at 6:16 am
[...] gramme von Harold Davis’ Photoblog 2.0 dienen. Er selbst stellt die Frage im Beitrag Is It Photography?. Tatsache ist aber, es ist durchaus möglich derartige Bilder auf analogem Weg zu er [...]
October 29th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
[...] links: Photograms topic on my blog, Photogram portfolio page, my photogram set on Flickr, Is It Photography?, Cross Processing, Photograms for the Digital Era, Rayographs. [...]
January 16th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
[...] lter play, like this stylized version of a photo of a marble, with stops along the way for Warhol-like renditions of a butterfly, to more surreal and apparently photographic images like World wi [...]
December 2nd, 2007 at 6:49 pm
[...] m the Cameroons, Stephanorrhina gaffata. I post-processed it in somewhat the same style as my Butterfly 2.
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on Sunday, December [...]
December 3rd, 2007 at 3:56 pm
[...] darkroom using masking, channel operations, and cross processing to create an effect that owes as much to painting as it does to photography.
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December 9th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
[...] Perhaps it’s just as well that Warhol came before Photoshop… Related images: Butterfly 2, Stained Glass Bug, Coleoptera.
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June 22nd, 2008 at 2:34 pm
[...] I blogged the image used on this cover here. [...]