Digital Variation, Alternative Ways of Seeing

In case you haven't noticed, digital technology in general, not just digital photography, is altering the way we perceive and interpret reality.

Pedro Meyer, digital photography pioneer and educator, discusses this topic in his editorials on his excellent website, ZoneZero.com. Fred Richtin, the longtime photo editor at the New York Times and now director of PixelPress.org and Associate Professor of photography and communications at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, also discusses the topic in great detail in his book, After Photography, and on his blog of the same name.

Richtin uses the apt analogy comparing the changes digital technology has initiated to the changes that occurred as a result of the change from horse drawn vehicles to vehicles propelled by the internal combustion engine. It is virtually impossible to fully predict the consequences of the new technology.

It has been possible to manipulate and alter photographs ever since its invention in the early 19th Century, but digital technique using algorithms to alter the image data has expanded the range of possibilities.

My background in photography is in documentary and photojournalism. Both closely related genres rely on optical realism. I have never had much more than a passing curiosity for my own work in the creative possibilities of image manipulation.

I am fascinated, however, with the questions and issues that digital technique have brought to the forefront. For example: Is there a point in altering an optically realistic photograph where it ceases to be a "photograph" and becomes a computer generated image? Or another: What are the interpretive implications of a digitally abstracted photograph?

In terms of objective internal content, an optically realistic photograph is very specific:

In this photograph, it is this red-eared slider turtle (not a snapping turtle) sunning itself on this limestone rock (not on a granite rock or on a log) with this algae growing on the rock (not a bare rock) in this water (not on the river bank) at this specific time of day (mid-day judging from the position of the shadows). All of that enters into the interpretation of the photograph.

But a digital abstraction of this same photograph using the "Find Edges" filter in Adobe Photoshop alters most of the information available in the original optically realistic version:

It's the same "photograph." It is still recognizably a turtle. But the interpretation of this altered version is much more ambiguous. The viewer must now rely on external context (any information associated with the image, but external to the image) and on the viewer's own experience in order to create an interpretation.

Here are some more images created using the "Find Edges" filter from previously published photographs in the San Antonio River series of posts: