Eliana Ivanova Photoshop has enabled the impossible to happen in photographs. Explore how artists have pushed the boundaries between reality and the impossible. Ever since Photoshop was introduced to society, artists, photographers and designers have been discovering new ways of improving their work. They have found advanced ways to develop their work with digital support. Photoshop has led to one of the most popular ways to manipulate photographs and pushed the use of surrealism forward. This helped surrealist artists to present their work in a better way than they did years ago. During 1930s when surrealism started expanding, it was known as a way of expressing dreams, in reality. This includes expressing illogical scenes throughout photographic precision, discovering bizarre creatures from everyday life, which allows the unconscious to express itself. Compared to nowadays, back in 1985 it was not so simple. Artists found it hard to create their works as the extra help available was limited. Their photographs were retouched by hand, using different techniques, such as using paint or ink. They were also merged together in a darkroom. Some of these techniques are still used in present, such as airbrushing, even though it was originated much earlier. This question it suitable for my narrative because looking at artists from before and after Photoshop such as, Grete Stern, Joel Robinson and Vincent Bouillon. Researching the chosen artists' works, enough knowledge is going to be gained to start improving and applying the learnt skills in my own work. Grete Stern This piece by Grete Stern is called (Dream No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home). It was created in 1948, which is in the artists' early life, and she continued developing and creating her art pieces until she retired from photography in 1985. As seen in the examples, Stern uses black and white coloring and photo manipulation as her medium to improve her photography. Stern is the perfect example of photoshopping without photoshop. Back in 1950s creating surrealistic art wasn't easy, as there was no digital help provided. Stern used a technique called Photomontage, which is the process and the result of making a complex image, by cutting, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new picture. She sticks to the black and white tones in all her works to give them an eerie look and a deeper meaning behind the images. This helped her to give them emotional depth. Her works are obvious and straightforward. For example, her work (Dream No. 1), the story behind the image clearly shows it’s meaning at first sight. It pictures a woman in the role of a base of a lamp, which is about to be switched on by a giant man. Her pieces are influenced by the world she lived in. She tells a story with her pieces, which is effective because she reminds us how women used to live in the past, as they were created in times when males were considered as the dominant gender. Stern showed this throughout surrealism by making the woman so small compared to the man’s hand which is impossible in real life. She found the perfect way of expressing her ideas and views on patriarchal values.
Stern uses a lot of dark and bright tones to draw more attention to the surrounding space. She uses light to emphasise all focal points in most of her images. For example, in Dream No.1 the paleness of the woman’s skin gives her a young and innocent look, and it also makes her stand out more than the other visuals in the composition. She used yellow shades and tones to create a vintage look to her image. Dream No.1 is the only work of hers which has black background. In most of her Images she used backgrounds with the same shade of grey as the main object, as the two images shown below. In an interview, she said “I never liked those hard shadows which were very often used at that time. Some critics thought that it was a bad way [to photograph], they said it’s all gray, it doesn’t say anything. But in the end, they did like it.” Grete Stern’s work interested me because of the use of grey shades. It gives her images a mysterious look, as the use of black and white gives the image more depth and creates and eerie effect. As an artist who lived in times that didn’t provide her any digital help, she had to spend a lot of time cutting, gluing and rearranging her photographs. She successfully entered and grew into the world of surrealism, yet still maintaining the strong message behind all her collections. Researching an artist like Grete Stern helped me understand that you don’t need much to tell a story using an image. She created the impossible, by using her own hands as tools to cut, glue, rearrange and merge. Throughout the history of her collections, she sticks with the idea of women in a world dominated by males. In the two black and white examples above are illustrated two women. In the first one, we can see the focal point of the image is where the mouth would usually be. Having all darker tones around it makes the absence of the mouth more visual and brighter in a sense. The fact that she doesn’t have a mouth could be reflective of the fact that back in the 1950s women’s opinion was not taken under consideration. Her face expression says a lot about the image itself. She is talking on the phone and she looks scared of what the other person is saying, but she doesn’t have the right to answer back. In the second image, we can see a tiny woman trying to climb up a washboard. Like the previous one she looks anxious. A lot of her work even though inspiring, I found very similar, repetitive and very close minded. This led me to another artist, Joel Robinson, who includes a lot of fantasy and imagination in his works using photo manipulation. Even though Stern’s work illustrates female characters, she changes the faces we are used to seeing to something impossible and surreal. The mixture of classical photography and surrealism is one of the best ways of showing the darkness carried on in history. The use of tones and face expressions as in the three examples above shows an emotional depth, which is reflected in all her pieces. Every work of Stern’s has some historical reference, illustrated by her use of women (for example as objects) in a male-dominated world.
The mood that Stern creates in her images is emotional and shadowy, as she aims to suggest sadness, which I believe has been achieved. It has been represented well by the use of grey colouring and facial expressions. The colour is important, as it is in harmony with the pure emotion of the characters and it emphasises what feeling is there already. Her images vary from landscapes to portraits. All the examples above create a vintage look, expressed in a different way. The first example has yellow tones to make the image look vintage. The other two examples look dirty and dusty. In my opinion, she managed to achieve the old-fashioned effect she was aiming for. Joel Robinson Joel Robinson’s work is suitable for my narrative, as he relies heavily on photoshop manipulation to create his stories through images. He is more imaginative in the sense that he uses fictional ideas when creating his outcomes. His artwork is mainly related to story books.
The first example from his artwork is called A New Realm. This piece is done later in his life and is very typical of the work he produces. He focuses on representing fictional stories or environments. All his pieces use similar coloration and tones. He uses the darkest tones of colours like blue, purple, brown, red, and as a result he adds a deeper sense of mystery to the images, which plays on the idea of fantasy he wants to represent. The lighting is also similar in all his images, in the three examples shown, the lighting is all the same level of darkness. The darkness surrounding the photographs also helps to create a focal point to get the audience’s attention. He uses dark tones in the negative space, which surrounds the main character of the photograph, and lighter colours and shades to create a halo affect on the subject. For example, in the image to the right, the cloud is the brightest visible subject, as Robinson used bright colours to create it. This makes the cloud the focus of the image. The dark brown shades create a frame around the wrist, which is growing a tree. Similar to the image with the dragon, the fire is the main focus due to the vibrancy of the colours orange and yellow to create the realistic flames. This brings it more attention and it leads the eye to itself first. The pitch-black background, surrounding the main subject, creates a frame around it, which centralises it even more. There are brighter colours around the fire, like the dragon or the character’s face. However, they carry less vibrancy. For instance, the character’s face is blurry, and it carries colour, the dragon is more eye-catching, as it’s a white piece of paper with writing on it. The position of the dragon is one more thing that draws attention to the fire. The paper dragon points down to the fire, which makes it the focus of the image. Robinson follows this technique in most of his artwork. He keeps a similar pattern with the theme, colour arrangement and tone. He uses it to create his own narrative using heavy photo manipulation to tell his stories. He also uses surrealism and creates his own fantasy world in Photoshop by changing how we see the world and visualise what we usually see written only in books or movies. The photo which grabbed my attention is A New Realm as it illustrates the imaginary world Robinson created. It fits with narrative, as it tells a story of fantasy and imagination. What I can see in the image is a character, who touches a mirror, but also is looking away from it. This can be interpreted in various different ways. One reading of it is that there is another world hiding in this mirror, it makes it look surrealistic because of the water effect he created, when the character touches the mirror. This goes to show that he is interested in what is hiding behind it. But the character is also looking away, which could mean that he doesn’t want to be dragged into a non-realistic world, but his curiosity makes him get closer and closer. Surrealism helped him visualise what he wanted to say, and the way he designed it communicates a lot to the observer. For instance, the background is in darker colours and tones, which gives more attention to the character and the mirror. The fact that he is pointing at the mirror, draws the viewer’s full attention to itself, as he is showing what the most
important subject of his artwork and his story is. The fog that he added around the main subject, centralises it more and it gives a sense of mystery. The work Joel Robinson creates is very abstract and unusual. In all of the three examples above he follows the same technique. The tones and colours are similar in all of them. They are warm and dark, such as dark brown or dark purple. For instance, the deep yellows and browns are very natural colours, and by using them he makes his work look natural and real. Almost every work of his is in a natural environment, like forests, or they have any kind of a natural form included. The dragon, being an animal, and the fire being a natural element. He creates surrealistic pieces, with existing and natural elements, like a human’s hand, a tree. He finds a way to combine both worlds through photo manipulation in Photoshop, by making the tones and the objects fit together well. The mood he sets in his artwork is mainly mysterious. By creating fantasy worlds, the viewer never knows what to expect, as fantasy doesn’t have limits. It could be everything, from a tree growing out of a hand, to a mirror which leads to another world. Most of his subjects in his artwork are things from everyday life, but he combines them in such a way that they start to look fictional. He makes them look like they belong to the world we live in. He does that by using nature as his main subject and inspiration. The tones and colours he uses are important, as they add to the natural theme he is aiming for in his works. Robinson’s work carries way more colour than Stern’s work, as he uses more fantasy in his pieces, and colours help him represent and visualize what is on his mind. They are also a representation of the child-like fantasies he owns. He uses Photoshop to manipulate his photography, and makes the impossible, possible. Using the same technique as him, my work is similar to his. Using heavy photo manipulation, my narrative carries a lot of fantasy and fiction in it. Taylor McCormick Taylor McCormick is an artist and a photographer who shows quality in her work. She takes advantage of the modern technology available to us like Photoshop and Illustrator. Similar to Joel Robinson she creates pieces which hold a very strong narrative. McCormick was born on the 14 th of September 1993 in Edgewood Kentucky. Now she studies photography at Savannah College. Taylor McCormick is an artist who uses narrative to tell a story. Similary to Joel Robinson she fits well with how artists have pushed the boundaries between reality and fantasy, to create and design their work. The examples given above are one of her most famous ones. The way she manipulates the photo, so that the human body is doing things that are not possible in real life, things we see only in movies, and read in book. The girl's body is floating/falling/ flying. The girl's hair and clothes also gives the sense of a floating human body, as it makes it look more realistic from the viewers point of view. All of these different features, suggest movement captured in one single photograph. All of the given examples, situations and compositions happening in the images make people question themselves, how why and where?
Taylor McCormick is an amazing case of how the utilization of advances in innovation can impact the way narrating in craftsmanship is made. What is most striking about Taylor McCormick is that she is still extremely youthful. She has just a single as of late enlisted at a school of expressions in Savannah where she considers photography. Until then her enthusiasm for photography and advanced craftsmanship was only an action she delighted in and she would do in her spare time. Amid a meeting with an adobe blogger she expressed that 'she had no formal preparing in photoshop and educated the product through youtube training...' this joined with interminable measure of experimentation saw her to where she is today. This further answers inquiries close by, current advances in different parts of innovation, for example, long range informal communication makes realizing these new programming and working strategies more open to a more extensive scope of individuals than any time in recent memory. Taylor McCeormick utilizes computerized equipment and programming to accomplish the impact in her picture. Utilizing a camera with control over the manual settings she can change things, for example, shade speeds keeping in mind the end goal to catch movements in a solidified frame. In the wake of taking her photographs she then goes into altering programming, for example, Adobe Photoshop to join pictures where she can then alter things, for example, lighting and immersion, so she can mix her pictures together. Her pictures hold a shift restricted shading bed like the picture above in that she all attempt's to a particular plan all through; this incorporates delicate skin tones, blurred blacks and a general pale washed out look. I feel that this makes seeing the picture significantly more satisfying and helps the eye to meander uninhibitedly around the picture without being reduced by a component that doesn't maintain her predictable tones of shading. It is obvious that despite the fact that she has consolidated at least two photos together, that she has still kept with the same central length and Gap esteem so that everything is kept in the extents and a similar profundity of field is kept all through. This make the account more trustworthy. It is protected to state that a large portion of McCormick's bits of work would not be conceivable without the utilization of current advances, for example, the equipment that is accessible to all of us today. Taylor McCormick is another commendable case of how craftsmen have pushed the limits of the conceivable and unthinkable, utilizing current advances in PCs. It fundamentally changes the way a story is being told. McCormick answers so intensely on PC innovation to guarantee that in spite of the fact that the circumstances, her manifestations are very dreamlike, they additionally can be viewed as extremely trustworthy, as they are pictures of genuine individuals in genuine areas. Conclusion In conclusion, it is visible and clear that advances in computer technology has enabled artists to push the boundaries between reality and fantasy, trough the examples I have shown. It is clear that artists, who worked years ago like Grete Stern, computer software like Photoshop were then unknown, and their work wasn’t as advanced and unrealistic as it is now for artists like Joel Robinson. Before Photoshop, to create a surrealistic piece artists used photography and collages to
do their work. Nowadays surreal impossible situations are capable to be made to look as believable as possible. Computers help to visualize the most impossible situations and scenes from an individual’s imagination. Although storytelling combined with modern technology has become a part of our every day lives, I think old techniques are still to be admired, as they hold very strong narratives, which can speak and spark even deeper than a piece created with modern advancements in technology. It is clear that intelligent computer system and photo manipulating software have significantly changed the way stories are told within modern piece of art. Graphic designers like Joel Robinson and Taylor McCormick, have really pushed the boundaries between what is reality and what fantasy, and I believe this wouldn’t have been possible without the touch of modern, advanced technology that we have now. From my view as a graphic design student, I prefer the level of believability, which can be shown in narrative pieces made with modern methods of design. I think it makes a better connection with the artists imagination. It gives them the freedom to create whatever surrealistic piece their imagination has born, without any limitations. The narratives made with the use of computers have significantly increased, especially over the past decade. As we live in a modern and advances world and society, we want to see something we haven’t seen before. Many people run business involving art, like movie posters, book covers, packaging of video games etc. and many of these art pieces might stay unnoticed, which can be a huge selling point. The connection between people and art is what I think matters the most. If we don’t admire and buy art, it gets to the point where it becomes pointless. And I think that through modern technology this connection can be made quicker and in a variety of different forms, which are not possible with the traditional methods. The work of Joel Robinson and Taylor McCormick is the living proof of this connection. They not only make people think, but they make people believe. They change how we see things in real life, by giving different proportions, forms and performances to the things we are already used with, looking and functioning in a particular way. In addition, these changes can be made not only to make the story more captivating, but also more believable to the audience.
Bibliography http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/19/grete-sterns-rediscovered-dreams https://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/jan/18/guardianobituaries1 https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1441?locale=en http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshop/2013/03/photography-prodigy-blurs-reality-and-imagination-aconversation-with-taylor-mccormick.html http://joelrobison.com/newest-images/ https://joelrobisonphoto.wordpress.com/extras/