Intro to Digi-Art @VU 2012: March 2012

Friday 30 March 2012

Cut, Copy, Paste in Photoshop 1

Use the pen tool to create collage.

Cut, Copy, Paste in Photoshop 2

Cut, Copy, Paste in Photoshop 3

Use the pen tool for collage.

Thursday 29 March 2012

Layer Mask Tutorial

This tute shows you how to blend one image into another.

http://photoshopcafe.com/tutorials/blend/blend.html

Wednesday 28 March 2012

Masters of Photography

Masters of Photography website has a list of older and contemporary influential and important photographers.

Tuesday 20 March 2012

Photoshop Tools

Most of the tools in Photoshop are very similar to those we have already been using in Illustrator. Most we won't require just yet either, but will in a couple of weeks when we start to collage.

If your photos only need minor tweaking, you can do it all in Camera Raw. If you want to make more extreme manipulations or effects, then Photoshop is the go.

Remember though, that we will be doing collage in a couple of weeks, this is were you can cut and paste several photos together, or go crazy with the effects.

Homework week 5

Find a photographer that interests you. Write 50-100 words on what it is about them or their work that appeals to you. For example it may be the aesthetic of their work, the subject matter, theme or technique. Include a link to their work. Remember to reference correctly if you include an image.

Genres and Contemporary Artists of Art Photography

Portraiture - Gillian Wearing, Hellen van Meene, Cindy Sherman, Tina Barney, Sam Taylor-Wood, Katy Grannan, Rineke Dijkstra.

Landscape - Elina Brotherus, Joel Sternfeld, Richard Misrach, Doug Aitken, Andreas Gursky, Dan Holdsworth.

Narrative - Gregory Crewdson, AES&F, Sarah Jones, Tracey Moffatt, Hannah Starkey, Bill Henson, Wang Quingsong, Jeff Wall.

Object - Laura Letinksky, Gabriel Orozco, Wolfgang Tillmans, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Thomas Demand, Vik Muniz, Zoe Leonard, Jean-Luc Moulene.

Fashion - Jonathan de Villiers, Craig McDean, Mert and Marcus, Camille Vivier, Corinne Day.

Document - Larry Sultan, Erwin Wurm, Martin Parr, Tacita Dean, Nan Goldin, Sophie Calle.

City - Melanie Manchot, Naoya Hatakeyama, Olivio Barbieri, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Thomas Struth.

List compiled from Bright, S. 2005, Art Photography Now, Thames and Hudson, UK.

Photography

Photography is constantly changing and hard to define. Its discursive and somewhat promiscuous nature has tended to confuse many people as to its status and value as an art form. The trouble is that it lends itself to many varied uses. We see photography in newspapers, surveillance, advertising campaigns and art galleries, and as fashion shots or family snaps. Meaning can slip and slide depending on context, and the fact that photography lacks any kind of unity and seems to have no intrinsic character makes the insistent cry of 'but is it art?' a constant refrain throughout its relatively short but complex history. Susan Bright 2005 'Art Photography Now', p. 7.

It is popular belief that the photograph was something to be believed, it was a moment frozen in time, an unquestionable product of authenticity. Photographs have never been evidence of absolute visual truth; double exposure and splicing, amongst other techniques, have been photographic processes since used to manipulate perception as early as the 19th Century.

Bright follows on by saying that the early reservations about photography has been exacerbated by the invention of digital technology, and now the question is not 'is it art?', but 'is it photography?' "One reason why digitization makes many observers uncomfortable is that it takes us away from reality and into the realm of fantasy, an area which at first seems at odds with a seemingly objective and descriptive medium. However, the photograph's role as a conveyer of 'truth' or as a trace of reality has long been contested; and photographs have always been manipulated" (ibid, p. 9).

Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) discusses the affect of modernity on the art making process, in particular the invention of photography, and how that has changed perception. He talks about the loss of the aura in art work that is reproducible, where authenticity and originality of a work of art cannot be reproduced with the image.

The Work of Art had an immense influence on artists working in the 1960s and 70s, such as Andy Warhol, Dan Graham and Robert Rauschenberg, who questioned photography's supposed evidence of reality; and as a result challenged aesthetic conventions.

Postmodernism "exposed how photography was used and understood as a medium, as a material and as a message; ... a work was no longer seen as the creation of a single 'author' who retained the monopoly on its meaning but as the product of a certain context with a multiplicity of meanings" (ibid p. 13).

Further Reading:
Bright, S. 2005, Art Photography Now, Thames and Hudson, UK.
la Grange, A. 2005 Basic Critical Theory for Photographers, Elsevier, Burlington. (electronic resource available from VU library)
Masters of Photography
Australian Photography and Photographers: Contemporary Australian Photography By Anne Marsh
Photography Reborn: Image Making in the Digital Era by Jonathan

Proposal due next week

Just a little reminder that your proposal is due next week.

Please be sure to reference using the Harvard system. A style guide is available from the library website.

Remember the 4 artworks you are planning on creating are an illustration, photograph, digital collage and video (not 4 artworks from just one medium).