Monday, April 16, 2012

Abstract Digital photography

By Amos Navarro


"Never have I came across the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold." -W. Eugene Smith

The invention of your camera liberated painting from its reportage role. Gone was the desire to produce a likeness, detail the events from the story, painting was unengaged to express emotions. True what went before contained an emotional content but now painting could experiment and thru creative interpretation permit the emotional content to predominate. Free of this constraint the painter could develop a fresh language and discover the motivations of their total art.

As the Nineteenth century evolved and during the entire 20th century painters in the impressionists with the cubists and expressionists to the minimalists could make use of colour, line and form to go instantly to the emotional content of their work. The representational aspect of the work turn out to be coincidental and was pushed to the point so it became akin to lying on the grass making shapes out of clouds. Enjoyable as it can be it is secondary to the nature of clouds.

The development the digital darkroom has given this freedom to photographers. All the different tools to correct and improve the camera's capture when pushed to the extremes makes a variety of fascinating effects. When added in to filters constructed into better software, images can be produced that any comparison to the original photograph is purely coincidental. As photographers explore this software and incorporate them in their photographs so their visual language will grow. The revolution on the medium with all the development from black and white into colour has taken its next phase. With the digital darkroom's continuously growing selection of tools the only real limitation could be the photographer's imagination.

Using these tools, the expert photographic artist usually takes the pop song and make, in visual terms, the lyric beauty of a baroque symphony or the down town jive of a jazz variation without a tree or a high rise around the corner. Only the light captured by the camera and fine tuned into something completely different, something new which comes in the photographer.

The photographer happens to be liberated much like the painter before them by technology. Now photographs can explore the complete range of human experience including those they have got no words to express. Large statements will likely be accessible by the photographer not only in physical terms. Although similar to their painter counterparts, through an additional feature of the technology, the larger canvas is starting to become the order of the day. That this canvas can express feelings as opposed to just illustrate them denotes that the photography is becoming an adult in the arts.




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