Digital Night
As black and white were, and in many ways remain, the default on ‘authenticity’
in photography, certainly before and even now after the arrival of colour
photography, so since the digital revolution in the world of the image, can we
locate a similar realm of ‘authenticity’ such that we feel ‘it’ is natural for
the technology involved. This is a deliberately provocative question in a world
where the (excessive) reliance on Photoshop (PS) is often still regarded as
fraud (documentary photographers are not supposed to use it) and yet the
computer PS manipulation of the image is the industry standard for workers with
the image… We would not normally separate the two – often regarding them as
stages in a single process. However in a world where anything can be morphed
into anything else, one such realm does suggest itself. A visual realm in many
ways like the black and white experience; involving a restriction of palate,
with a concomitant set of moods and a set of specific challenges… part of the
nature of the digital image, as yet unexplored, but occasionally exploited by photographic
artists, just as the blur and dazzle of traditional photography were
appropriated - before the (automatic) default of digital tidiness made this one
time ‘hazard’ an extremely difficult thing to deliberately (and creatively)
employ.
Of gaps and
rediscoveries in ‘official’ or normal, even normative, practice and production.
A little like art before abstraction and music before noise - cooking of
necessity has always reincorporated the ‘scraps’, the results are many of the
world’s most loved dishes (carabonara, chaofan/fried rice, many salads and
soups) from peasant necessity to haute cuisine no less. Then there are
patchwork quilts and patched clothing. Perhaps most notorious are, the once
banned, ‘augmented fourth’ (staple of blues, jazz and chromatic or augmented
tonality) and the drip-painting of Jackson Pollack. All regions at once
marginal, now ‘returned’ to use, ‘rediscovered’, and ‘natural’ or ‘authentic’;
in the sense of a basic, intrinsic (if once ignored or even tabooed) part of
the technology or cultural practice involved..
What region of the digital image does this? Once flash photography
was de riguer for low light levels
(with its flattening out of the image, its foregrounding and bleaching). But
with the arrival of the digital image; a low level of light will suffice for
most purposes… The grossness of flash (some foregrounding effects excepted) can
be happily dispensed with. So what does digital night look like? One effect:
the colour palate is progressively restricted (pretty much the same occurs at
higher light levels as we move through bleaching towards white-out), a result
of the machine struggling with the diminishing light levels. After passing
through a nocturnal realm of moody blues and ethereal greens (none of which
were achievable with flash or artificial lighting), we arrive at an altogether
harsher zone. Here the image of night is made up out of light sources and their
more concentrated reflection: the rest fades to black; red and orange
(sometimes yellow) being the most prominent colours. Pure, warm and
contrasting; like looking into a fire on a dark night – often coming in
semi-abstract or even cubist-style blocks. Colours in this palate so rendered
are ‘authentic’; not (only) because pre-PS , but because this offering of a
particular and much restricted set of colours, tones, and textures are caused
by the very lack of the light required by the digital process of recording
reality. The response of a technology at full stretch. But a ‘true’ or
‘natural’ response nevertheless… A ‘second nature’ provided by the machine –
its default, or bottom line. So, ‘authentic’, in terms of the technology
involved (as all ‘authenticity’ as a product of a restricted cultural
community, of the technology of identity, never really ‘natural’ – prior or
apart from its particular cultural determinations). Natural in the sense of a
function of the level of organization involved, of the organ or organism
producing the effects in question (here an extension of our organ of vision and
the meanings we distribute across the visual field). The second nature of a
culture being transformed by technology.
Such images are
recorded at the limit of the machine’s technological capacity, but an essential
part of its ‘nature’ – such are the means of expression. Its uses pose a
question for artistic production. Our reading of its meaning; the content of
expression, the images signified content, is a matter for the viewer – each
arriving with their very own highly customized view-finding apparatus…
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2013