even. There were several big waves of technology that moved Photoshop into new application areas. The first big wave was the World Wide Web. People suddenly needed to produce lots of photographs and reproduce them at small size for display in web browsers. Then the real breakthrough technology for fine art photographers was the inkjet printer. Because suddenly now you could print a high-quality photograph one off, not do separations and do a whole press run of thousands of photographs, but you could suddenly print out single photographs. So photographers could do a high-quality scan on their slide scanner, and then do a print of that photograph. It opened up a whole new work flow for the professional photographer. Then things totally exploded when the digital cameras became practical—and Photoshop predates all three of those things.
There are a couple of times when I realize the impact that Photoshop has had. When you walk into a bookstore, one of these big chain bookstores, nowadays, and you see the Photoshop section of the books, and there’s often three or four shelves of books of people trying to teach people how to use Photoshop. And that’s mind-boggling to consider that I started that program that everybody’s struggling to learn, and it’s so popular that every bookstore in the country basically has a little section on this particular product. And the other time that reminds me is when I’m watching a random movie or TV show, and they use the word Photoshop, usually as a verb. Creating my own word in the English language is kind of cool.
The original reason we did Photoshop was because it was really fun to manipulate images on a computer. We weren’t really thinking of any practical uses of it at all, but as soon as people saw that they could manipulate images very easily on a computer, they developed uses. And every time I watch really good users using Photoshop, I’m amazed by the variety of things they can do with it, that I would never have thought of when I was writing the program.
I’m still the first name on the Photoshop splash screen. Fortunately it’s just a name and it’s not a face, and I can live a fairly anonymous life most of the time.
THE DECISIVE MOMENT BECOMES DAY TO NIGHT
Stephen Wilkes
The Day to Night series started, really, as a sonnet or love poem to New York City. I’ve always been fascinated by the energy of the city, and the pulse of New York City. If you look at the history of photography, there have been specific moments when there were these shifts, where the way we look at the world changes through the technology of photographing, and what happens in a camera. If you look at Muybridge and you look at the work of Harold Edgerton, those were sort of moments where suddenly, our perception of what a photograph is, changed. We’ve gotten to a point with technology now, with Photoshop, that we can really change the way we look at a single photograph. Suddenly, a single photograph can change time, within one frame. And so that concept was very exciting to me.
On location I’m just scanning very, very specific areas, looking for moments. I’m taking photographs for 15 hours. I sit and I photograph everything that I see. So every little detail, every little moment that you see in my photograph, is something I’ve consciously taken. It’s only upon taking all those images that I look at them, and I study them, and I edit them down from, say, 1,400 photographs to 50 of the best moments from the morning, midday, late afternoon, and evening. And then, working with the retoucher, I put the images together. What I love about the work is that you don’t feel the hand. You do not sense the fact that I’m changing time, immediately. It’s only upon closer examination that the photograph begins to reveal the fact that you’re actually seeing these wonderful moments that happened at a very specific time, during that day and into the night.
I think as an artist today, anything you can imagine, you can create. That’s an amazing statement, really, if you think about it, as a photographer, that you can do things that you never dreamed about being able to execute before. Now I want to go in and explore this next dimension of where—where can still photography go?
Ruud van Empel
I actually completely stopped taking photos during the ’90s, because it didn’t interest me and it took too long, and that interest revived when the digital camera came. I was very happy when the computer came and Photoshop came. I remember when I saw it the first time, I was really amazed that I could do everything right there. I couldn’t sleep anymore, from that moment on.
I bought my computer in 1995 and started doing Photoshop. The first idea I had was that I wanted actually to make a picture completely like reality, but one that’s completely montaged. I wanted to control the image completely. I wanted to create my own people. I had so many ideas coming up of what I could do, suddenly.
What I do now is I make a sketch of the idea, basically, that’s just the simple idea. And I take all kinds of photos, and I’m not sure if I’m going to use them, but those things I never know at first. So I have a few ideas of what I want to do, and work with that, and start from there. But how it looks in details is something that arises during the process, when I’m making it. If there is a person in the image, I start with the face first. That’s the most important part, also the most difficult part. That could be like 100 or 200 layers, itself. The mouth, the lips—the mouth can be like 20 montages. So when that’s done, I make it one layer, and then I start on the body, and that could be also like 100 layers. When that’s finished, I start to do the background. Then, again, you have a few hundred layers. And sometimes it doesn’t work out. So I have to do a few different backgrounds or change the idea or change the whole composition. So sometimes I’m working for months, and I end up with no results. That’s possible. It happens. What I do, when it’s completely finished, the image, I put a grain all over it before it’s printed. So that brings everything together. I think because of the digital possibilities, you want to do different things. That goes for me, because you can create so many things. I wouldn’t be doing this, I think, with an analog technique. I can really make things realistic in the way I had imagined them to be. It’s inspiring.
Richard Benson, Mark Bussell, John Cohen, David Goldblatt, Jerome Liebling, Platon, and Stephen Wilkes
BENSON:
I think Photoshop is a tremendous, tremendous tool. It’s a digital Swiss Army knife, and you can have stuff sitting on your desk and chop it up and leave it there. So, to me, it’s this incredibly versatile tool.
WILKES:
It’s like being a writer and never having had a thesaurus, and suddenly, somebody’s given you this wonderful tool to have all these other words, so you can express yourself in a much deeper way.
GOLDBLATT:
On the computer screen, if I want to burn in or hold back tiny details, or bigger details, I can do so very selectively. The rest of the image is quiescent. Nothing is happening to it. It’s simply there. Whereas in the dark-room, of course, it’s accumulating light. So, if I have, as in one photograph, I think there must be about 12 pairs of eyes under a midday sun in Africa, I can go to each one of those eye sockets, if I have to, and lighten it or change the contrast within it.
COHEN:
I’ve done a little bit of Photoshop and all that. I know the things that you can do. You can work much, much
