MODULE 1- DIGITAL IMAGE EDITORS, ADJUSTMENTS, TRANSFORMATIONS + 2D COLLAGE

I. Introduction

This module will introduce and explore pixel-based image editors like Adobe Photoshop, through the technical lens of layers and composition, basic photographic adjustments, and transformations and effects. These explorations will connect to the design fundamentals collage and remix, and creative expression and communicating meaning through self-portraiture. The majority of digital image editors are raster or pixel-based, meaning that they primarily apply processes to the pixels that construct bitmapped images. Many digital images - digital photos, AI-generated images, digitally created illustrations, paintings and graphics, images that appear in web browsers, and digitized physical artworks, like scans - are bitmap images, meaning their smallest unit-of scale is a single pixel, in most cases a square with a designated color and transparency level assigned to it. Bitmapped digital images are grids composed of thousands to millions of pixels.

Digital creative technologies like image editors are excellent tools for adjusting and altering photographic images, transforming photographic images and recombining multiple photographic images into new compositions. They can be used to develop unique digital images or graphics as well, but in this first module, we will be primarily exploring the different processes that you can apply to already-existing digital photographs.

Towards the end of this module, we will begin to explore the shift from adjusting and transforming images to using collage techniques to create fully unique compositions, that express new meanings. There is an interesting, infinite space between a photographic image and a new collaged composition, and this is a space that many artists operate within, including those who's work predates digital creative technologies. This module's project will work towards creating new meaning via this collage and remix approach.

1. Image Adjustments

Digital image editors apply many different types of "adjustments" to images at a pixel-level. Most of these technologies have a method for selecting all or some parts of an image to apply these adjustments to, using different selection techniques. These processes often either direct mirror processes that can be produced physically, especially through different drawing, printing, painting, and photographic techniques / technologies, or enhance these processes to stretch and push the effects past physical possibilities.

1.1 Contrast, Brightness + Composition

Contrast refers to the levels of light and dark in a single composition. A high-contrast image has different areas that are very dark and very light, while a low- contrast image has more midtones combined with areas of primarly darker or lighter shades.

High-contrast images can be intentionally designed to direct the way a viewer's eye moves through an image, and/or used to define a space or attract/deflect attention. The tension created by the difference in the shades create a sense of visual drama, that can be used to influence or even construct meaning. This technique is definitely not new to artists or creative technologies. Below are oil paintings by Baroque Painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 - 1610). He employs an effect known as Chiaroscuro - using high contrast to develop the illusion of depth - in his work to not only breathe life into his figures but infuse the narratives with a sense of drama and action.

Before digital technologies, photographic contrast was intentionally designed and achieved via subject / scene design {such as intentionally chosen clothing or backdrops}, lighting and framing. As photographic technology advances, more could be achieved via film-selection, in-camera processes and film / developing processes and timing. Below are photographs from 1900's to the 1950s. The contrast levels in these photographs were achieved strictly "in-camera" and/or with traditional analog darkroom and developing processes - along with intentional subject matter and framing choices.

1.2 Lighting, Process + Meaning-Making in Photography

Photographers use contrast and lighting processes to influence, shape and communicate meaning. While most of the examples in this section focus on portraiture, these basic concepts can be applied to visual aesthetics across different subject and mediums {as evidenced by Caravaggio's works. I'm featuring portrait photography because it connects to this module's studio project, but, these principles are not in any way limited to only photography or only portraiture. The photographers below work with lighting (and the resulting levels of darks and lights) as a key component in their visual compositions. The contrast and lighting in these photos are achieved primarily via the photographers capture settings, framing / composition decisions and the physical lighting in the scenes, as opposed to processes applied using digital tools (a process sometimes referred to as post-production). For each example, consider what techniques the artist utilized in order to achieve contrast and intentionally influence composition, and how these design choices impacted the visual feeling of each piece or directly communicated information or meaning.

1.3 Artistic Design Choices + Digital Technologies

It is the artist's decision how much to rely on digital processes or "post-production" to adjust for lighting and contrast. Image editors can be used to adjust the levels of relative lightness and darkness in existing photographs and other images, as well as areas of images. For a strictly photographic output, these are all effects that can be achieved without digital technologies / image editors, and it can be more effective to think of these digital adjustment tools as one option to more effectively and intentionally balance contrast, versus the only method for achieving contrast.

Digital contrast and levels adjustments also allow designers more opportunities to push the limits of contrast in images, and more easily experiment with how contrast might shift or change meanings. There are many contemporary artists who focus their critical creative practice around how these technological affordances are used to intentionally manipulate meaning in media, or how technologies like film and digital photography can be embedded with biases that change the way different subjects are portrayed. We will discuss this issue more in-depth in Module 2 - below is a short article to start this conversation focusing on the use of post-production effects to darken O.J. Simpson's portrait for the June 1994 issue of Time Magazine, and how that intentional adjustment was used to influence meaning and establish a narrative for a mass audience.

https://laist.com/shows/the-frame/why-a-manipulated-magazine-photo-plays-a-pivotal-role-in-the-people-v-oj-simpson

1.4 From Photographic to Graphic

Using digital tools to experiment and expand contrast and other image-level adjustments can also be very useful for designers and artists working with photographic images as an intermediate step to their final artworks. Many designers working with screen-printing technologies, for example, play with the tension between the input image - the photograph - and the output image - the screen-printed graphic. These post production tools can be an integral part of that process, where the higher the contrast can alter the amount of detail communicated, but also shift a more high-fidelity, medium-contrast photographic image to a more lo-fidelty, but iconic / impactful graphic image.

The artworks below explore this shift and space between photographic and graphic. As with many of the artworks in this course, these are made with non-digital creative technologies processes in order to provide context for where certain visual aesthetics developed, and to also demonstrate how these expanding technologies have allowed artists more freedom to experiment and push these explorations.

Andy Warhol

There are many different reasons that artists might develop images that are not quite photographs, and not quite illustrations. Andy Warhol utilized the screen printing process to achieve his graphic, signature style. He was interested in creating work that addressed issues such as reproduction, commercialism, and the commodification of culture, art and celebrity. He used the process of screen printing - at the time a mostly commercial process used to mass-produce images - to add to this meaning.

Emory Douglas

Emory Douglas is an artist and designer who created the iconic illustrations for the Black Panther newspaper, originally printed in the 1960's. These unique and powerful screen prints also explore the territory between photographic and graphic, but for different reasons and with different goals in mind. Douglas intended to capture the ideology of a movement, to inform, and to also inspire. These images - like Warhol’s - were also screen printed, but because it was the most economical and accessible way to mass produce printed material at the time.

I think it is interesting to note that this screen printed visual aesthetic is still heavily associated with and adopted by contemporary activist artists, even though many of the technological processes that were once completely tied to these aesthetics have been advanced in ways that no longer limit color or level of detail. The four-color offset printing process, which produces near photo-quality prints with a high color spectrum, is now much more affordable for mass printing than screen-printing, and yet many artists and designers employ a graphic style more closely tied to screen printing, using components such as high contrast / graphic photos, solid, limited colors, and even halftone screen textures (the "dots" in some screen printed images that imply shading) in their visuals. At this point, the properties that were once simply the affect of technological limits have shifted meaning over time so that they now signify other meanings.

2. Image Distortions and Effects

Digital image editors have capabilities to apply visual effects and distortions to photographic images, either to entire images or selections of images. Some of these effects have a strong visual aesthetic that can be hard to separate from the tool itself, which can distract from the final aesthetic or convey unintended meaning. Other effects or distortions can be applied in ways that are more subtle, or involve a more complex, intentional digital process. This allows the distortion to become an integrated part of the final image / artwork.

2.1 Distortion + Designing Meaning

When I use distortion or effects in my images, I do it as part of a process for achieving a very specific visual goal that is usually related to what I intend to communicate with my piece. I try to never start with an effect, and instead, start with an aesthetic goal I am aiming to achieve. Below are examples of different artists who have distorted self- portraits using various analog processes and technologies. These artists manipulate their portraits for a spectrum of different reasons and outcomes. When viewing these portraits, consider how the distortion affects the meaning of each piece. How do you find yourself responding to these different images, and how does that distortion play into your response?

While all of these examples are hand-painted distortions, physical transformations of materials done without digital technologies, or subject's themselves being physically manipulated or otherwise physically changed, they can be a good place to start when devising different ways you might digitally manipulate images. This is because these artists started more with an idea or a goal, and then developed different methods for producing that effect in their artworks. These images also exhibit that interesting space between photograph and graphic - for the most part they are rooted in their photographic nature, yet also communicate something surreal. This is a theme that we will continue to explore throughout this course, as digital tools truly expand that possibility space.

3. Layers, Transformation, + Collage

Most modern digital image editors utilize a convention known as layers, which allows artists and designers to stack multiple independent layers in a single image. These layers can be independently selected, edited, adjusted and transformed, and otherwise changed without losing pixel-information of layers below and above. This convention allows for in-depth processing, more complex image transformation and construction, lower-stakes experimentation and more streamlined image organization and prototyping. The drawbacks, however, is that too many layers can lead to a loss of precision or focus in the design process.

Layers within images do not need to take up the entire canvas size. This affordance allows artists to easily experiment with composition of the full image via repositioning, resizing, rotating, cutting, copying, duplicating, and otherwise transforming different layers. This is something that is very useful in developing and designing digital collage.

3.1 Early 2D Collage - Dada Roots and World War One

2D Collage is a technique with subversive roots that unfortunately tend to get lost with time, the advancement of creative technologies, and the relative ease of production, along with the proliferation of its visual aesthetic in many different areas.

Visual collage was explored heavily by the Dadaist movement in Europe in the 1920s, and continued by the Surrealist movement in the mid 1920’s. This movement grew out of the reactions to the impact of WWI, as well as the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. European artists experienced first-hand the destruction and human costs resulting from industrialized warfare. WWI was the first major war that utilized things like machine guns, tanks, airplanes and chemical weapons. It was also the first war to be photographed extensively, and these visuals were widely shared via newspapers utilizing advancements in printing technology and distribution. This newly formed mass communication technology resulted in WWI having an even more widespread and global impact, since even people who did not witness the war across the UK and Europe still felt the social and psychological impacts.

Dadaism grew out of the social "rejection" of war as a product of "civilization" + "culture”. Many of these artists took components that symbolized this type of mainstream culture and technology - such as advertisements, newspaper clippings or other mass-produced images - physically cut them up, and then re-assembled them in ways that appeared non-sensical, unreasonable and/or abstract. From this perspective, the act of collage breaks down these symbols, and turns them into new symbols to express new meanings in the viewer’s imaginations. This viewer outcome is something similar to the interior game worlds that immerse players and transport them to a different reality.

“Dada wished to replace the logical nonsense of the men of today with an illogical nonsense,” - Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia

“The beginnings of Dada…were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust.” -Tristan Tzara.

Dadaists didn’t stop at mass-produced media and photographic images when developing collaged artworks. They also worked with cutting and recombining textual images, texts, narratives and sculptural objects. Reviewing some of the "readymade" collaged objects below could be particularly helpful when designing your personal creative technology tool for the first project's module.

3.2 Collage and the Political, Remix as action

The Dadaist movement was followed closely by the Surrealists, another group of artists producing artworks that were in many ways also informed by the events of a war, this time WW2. While Dadaism was more anarchist in its direct deconstruction of political and social structures through images, text and sculpture, Surrealism critiqued these same elements with the complete rejection of rational thought, the idea being that perhaps if people could learn to imagine, dream and create in new ways, then these atrocities would cease to exist.

I think these early approaches to radical art-making are interesting to view in context with later collage works that are also very political and/or social. What was at first implied more conceptually or as a physical technique in the cutting and reconstitution of images, later began to incorporate more recognizable texts, images and symbolic juxtapositions. Was this because the viewer and technology was changing, and what was once a shocking technique did not deliver the same impact? Or did this change occur as the technique spread and more and more artists brought their own ideas and styles to the practice of collage, along with their own personal experiences.

Some of the images below contain challenging images and content - in these examples, these images are being used explicitly by artists who are challenging their iconography, content and/or what they symbolize. Many of the artists adopting and working with these images are doing so from a standpoint of deconstruction or reclaiming and have a connection with, relationship to, and understanding of them that might involve a specific personal experience, how the artist identifies, or what different communities the artist might belong to.

Martha Rosler

Enrique Chagoya

JoHn Stezaker

Lorna Simpson

3.3 Contemporary Collage - Digital + Physical

Below are more examples of contemporary collage, including some collage produced with digital tools. Similar to how the early collage artists above were cutting words and images from printed newspapers and advertisements, contemporary artists can used digital tools to do the same thing with digitized media. Digital mages, text, sounds, music, speeches, videos, movies, tv shows, video games and even computer programs / algorithms can be recombined to create something new. Digital tools and processes make this technique more diverse and expansive, however, the core idea - the breakdown of the "original", the critique of the mainstream remains the same.

When viewing the examples below, consider how each artists intentionally makes the collage process more or less visible in the final artworks. Digital image editor affordances make it possible to transform and recombine combine images in ways that appear completely "realistic", where the final composition looks like a single image. This is one use of the term "photobashing", where digital processes are used in a way that the cuts and recombination are seamless, even thought the final image might be absolutely impossible or fantastical. Why might an artist choose to use this technique, versus a more obviously collaged or constructed approach? How might this change the meaning of the final piece?

Nikkolas Smith

Smith applies traditional collage concepts of cutting and recombining to make work that produces a range of final visual outcomes while working with the same overall collage aesthetics. These collaged artworks result in a range of final overall aesthetics. Below are examples of his collage work, showing how this process can be about creating spaces for new possibilities, some that critically challenge oppressive structures and others that humorously deviate from conventional expectations.

Ruben Marquez

Lola Dupree

William Yu and #STARRINGJOHNCHO

Below are collage artworks by William Yu. Yu's project, #starringjohncho, incorporates images of the actor John Cho into film posters where he was not the original actor, in a more "photobash" style. The actors in these films were predominately white, and Yu’s remix artworks are intended to bring attention to the lack of AAPI + South Asian American representation in mainstream US films and television shows, especially as main, protagonist characters. Since these collages work with known narratives and films - they can operate on a few levels. If the viewer recognizes that John Cho did not star in the original film, the images present a question to explore - why did the artist decide to create this image? What status quo does this image challenge? And, if the viewer is not familiar with the film enough to know that John Cho did not star in it, they are presented with visual evidence of a re-imagined reality, where, in their minds, Cho was always the lead actor.

4. Projects + Self-Portraiture

This module's project will partially include a self-portrait aspect, which is why many of the examples we have reviewed also connect to themes of self-expression, identity exploration and/or personal expression. Self-Portraiture and portraiture is a very frequently explored process by artists across cultures and time periods. The creative action of depicting, processing, and then communicating a sense of identity or expression through an image can bring up a lot of different questions and considerations, among them:

Authorship: who "created" the image? The photographer, or the person posing for the image?

Ownership: Who owns the image? Who has rights to reproduce the image? Does that change if someone is selling the image?

Narrative + Identity: What information is the artist trying to communicate with this portrait? Is there a narrative that the portrait constructs in the viewer's mind? What type of meaning might a viewer infer about the subject, and how much of this is objective v.s. subjective? In cases of self portraits, what kinds of information or, possibly, misinformation, is the artist trying to communicate?

There are many other reasons why artists are interested in portraiture, which also change over time and within different cultures and artistic practices. The works we have reviewed have been primarily from the last 150 years, but there has also been a monumental shift in the practice of portraiture in the past ~20 years with the adaption of digital photography, social media, and, not to be forgotten, user-facing cameras / selfies. These digital technologies, many of which serve dual communication, media, and creative purposes, have quickly and drastically shifted the ways in which mass culture has thought about and understood self-portraits, self-expression, and personal narrative. Contemporary artists are just starting to explore these questions and impacts in their work.

Again, these are only a few of the questions that artists are trying to answer with their work in this field - I wanted to mention it since it relates to a prominent theme that will resurface repeatedly throughout this course: how different digital creative technologies and processes both allow for new possibilities in design and art-making practices, and also generate ideas that artists create work about.