Photo Exhibition Blog

Photo retouching was tedious and laborious in the darkroom. Today digital photo manipulation opens new vistas to the point where a photograph is no longer evidence in court.

Collage (from the French colle = glue) and montage (from the French monter = to mount) are genres beyond scrapbooking. Morphing is the new technique where the computer can extrapolate any number of transitions between two disparate images.

Image recognition has gone in leaps and bounds. For example facebook automatically detects a person's face on uploaded photos and invites you to tag your friends as you go.

Surveillance cameras in security systems can be programmed to detect a missing painting on the wall despite visitors walking past in the art gallery and light conditions changing from day to night hours.

Deep etching is widely used in catalogues to make an item for sale standout on a pure white background.

If you feel you have some surrealist inspiration and want to follow in the steps of Salvador Dali what can digital photo manipulation can offer you? The sky literally is the limit! Some artist take landscape shots with the express purpose of changing the lighting and the colour balance to bring a dramatic effect to an otherwise mundane shot.

Others blend together elements from different cultural landmarks to create a challenging scenery where the Statue of Liberty could be seen in the distance at the edge of a lake with snow peaked mountains in the distance and a Chinese man sitting in a sampan in the foreground.

The artistic effect of course is the dissonance between those elements which do not belong to each other. The pseudo reality of the photographic quality of the image is betrayed by the obvious mismatch of the elements present in the image. For someone who hasn't travelled, is un-educated or is a child the image would not trigger any concern.

Unfortunately this type of endeavour has not been limited to art. Some graphic artists with an axe to grind have defamed politicians by putting their public face on a rather crude and rude setting - the backlash of fame I suppose. Satirical cartoons have long been the weapon of choice of political descent - switching over to cleverly retouched photographs is still something most of us would feel uncomfortable with. Not so much because it can tactfully make the point but because suddenly we discover that we cannot even trust a photograph anymore.

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