OK. Now leave it, and we’ll come back. I’ve gone back to the negatives and just found such riches.
The thing that I object to with digital is Photoshop. I think if you want to make pictures, you want to be a painter…well that’s fine, go ahead and do it, but don’t call it photography. Photography meant there was a response to the fact of life. [With Photoshop] what you’re saying is, I don’t really need the world; I can make the world. And artists, painters, have been doing that for many, many years. But then I go back to that essence that I thought photography as mirror image was very important and special.
SIMON:
In many ways digital is closer to painting than it is to photography, because you can keep going back to the work over and over again. You can keep adding and subtracting—and returning to it for changes. It can be visited again and again, as one would a painting. It’s more handmade, and less about the moment.
In my work, I use Photoshop in a limited form—mostly to allow a digital image to look like film. Endless hours are wasted trying to achieve what I formerly achieved on film.
BENSON:
When you manipulate pictures on the computer, you have as much time as you want to do what you want, and it’s absolutely wonderful. And in the darkroom, you might have been strapped with time a little bit, but the real problem of the darkroom is you were in the dark, and there’s nothing more ridiculous than making pictures in the dark.
I also think that if you’re a practicing artist, and you’re making pictures, and you’re making photographs, you should make them quickly. They’re not like painting. They’re something you make quickly. And I think if you can’t tune a picture on a computer in five minutes, you should throw it away and make another picture. And the idea that people will sit and spend a couple of hours working on a picture is unbelievably stupid to me.
Also, people who work with multiple layers, which is something that Photoshop is great at, they do manipulations in layers with an idea that you can go back and undo things, and that’s an absolutely fundamental lack of faith in yourself to make a permanent decision. And so to my mind, that’s stupid, too. I think if I was compositing or collaging, I might spend more time at it. But you see, those pictures are being made by somebody who’s more interested in the inside of their mind, and the way it can generate a picture, than the way the world can generate a picture, so that’s a fundamental difference in approach. I think the world is much more interesting than what I think, and that doesn’t mean everybody has to feel that, but that’s what I feel.
PLATON:
It is liberating. It’s an incredible tool, but I’m only interested in what I want to say with it. The danger with Photoshop is it’s infinite, and the worst thing I believe you can do, when you sit down at the computer, is not know where you want to take your image. You should never sit and say, “Well, I’ll dial up the contrast. No, I’ll dial it down. I’ll saturate it. No, I’ll desaturate it.” You’re going to be lost very quickly. So what you have to do, before you sit down, is almost switch off the lights and ask yourself the very difficult question, what do I want to say? Can I see it in my head first? And then you sit down, and you use the tools to chase your idea, but if you don’t have an idea, then the technique is dominating what you’re doing.
WILKES:
There’s this sense that you were almost operating in a universe as opposed to a solar system. There is no boundary, anymore, about where we can go or what you want to do. I want to share a story. When I launched the inkjet technology with Epson, I worked with Nash Editions. Mac Holbert was the printer, and he had worked with Horace Bristol, who was a wonderful Life magazine photographer. Horace, I believe, was in his eighties, and he sat down at a computer, and Mac was printing his work for the first time, digitally, and Mac said to him, “Hey, Horace, what do you want to do in this print?” And he says, “Well, Mac, you know that knee was always too bright. Do me a favor, just darken that down.” And Mac took the wand, and went whoosh. And all of a sudden, he hears this guy—he hears like crying, he’s all choked up, and he turns and looks back at Horace, and he says, “Are you OK, Horace? Is everything OK?” He says, “I’m OK, Mac,” he said, “but I just wish I was a younger man to take advantage of this technology.” And that was the way he felt, and I believe that’s the way all these guys would’ve felt, all the great masters—I just think, again, it was always about getting there, not how you got there.
BUSSELL:
If you go through the morgue in any newspaper, and you see how things were airbrushed, and how things were changed, and how things were printed, and cut out, I don’t think you would be worried about Photoshop either.
WILKES:
This is where there’s a great irony, for me, is supposedly the great masters never manipulated, or did anything. Clearly that’s not the case. Guys did everything from drawing on negatives to layering negatives. I mean, photoshop was invented way before “Photoshop.”
Alfred Gescheidt
I call myself a photo illustrator. And they say, “But you’re a photographer.” I said, “Yeah, that’s why I say photo illustration.” My first published work was in Life magazine, in 1951. I’m 22, I’m just a kid, and I just know, intuitively, if I’m ever going to get my career started, I’ve got to do something quote-unquote “different.”
[Showing his work below] This happens to be a nude, and I did a number of them. People asked, “How’d you do that?” I said, “Well, very simple.” I had a jig, which I put underneath my enlarger. I’d make one exposure, and turn the jig. Just keep turning it. Just keep turning it. Turning it. Oh, what happened if you screwed up on one? You start all over again, that’s what you do! So I did a bunch of them, and they were wildly successful. I mean, a magazine called it “Alfred’s Asterisks.”
I remember, there was a photographer called Jerry Uelsmann, either he or his assistant, or somebody associated with him, said, “We want to know how you’re doing these things. How many enlargers do you have?” And he came up to my little apartment, and he saw one D2 Omega, and said, “Well, where are the others?” I said, “That’s it.” I mean, they thought I had a whole battery of enlargers. In some cases, I said I did; they were someplace else. I mean, I didn’t want to [laughs]—you know, they were so intrigued.
I met the art director of Playboy, and after I showed my work, he says, “I want your stuff in my magazine.” I said, “Me, for Playboy! You’re crazy.” “I just want you to do what you want to do.” So I had a box that said GESCHEIDT’S WORLD, and everything was erotic, and silly, and stupid.
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