Photoshop Universe

I was thinking about how Wysocki defines new media more broadly than Manovich and Murray, who define new media as more digital. In particular, I thought about how she says that new media texts cause us to look at all texts in a new way. New media, then, makes us read all texts with different patterns--literally, how the eyes move--and with different expectations.

Since its birth, photography has been used not to represent the exact world--"reality"--but to represent the world as the photographer sees it, wanted to see it, or wanted to project it. I'm thinking of how Mathew Brady's Civil War photographs were composed and how there was this collective intake of breath when people learned he had dragged the bodies around before taking pictures when the topic was on the news some years ago. It was nothing new to historians.

The issue forces us to confront how we construct reality and what we accept as reality. Here are a few related to Brady's work, but these could be about any photographed subject:

1. To what degree is public memory of the Civil War created by Brady's photographs?

2. Does how we construct our (civic, national, etc.) memory of the Civil War change when we know the photographs were arranged? (i.e., does it matter that he did it?)

3. How do these questions contribute to considering where art and history intersect?

Okay, it seems I'm wandering (wondering?) far from the "new media" topic, but I wanted to take a historical angle on photographic manipulation. It's another case of what I call "the past as it never was." Photography never did or could represent reality "perfectly."

So I need to bring this back around to Wysocki, who says new media causes us to look at all texts in a new way. Certainly, Photoshop causes us to question photographs--and I know I'm not saying something new or earth-shattering here, but learning how to use Photoshop has made me consider how much of what I see in photos has been retouched. (I used to think of Photoshop mostly of obvious montages, but Deke has opened my eyes to the world of improving the average.) The larger issue at work is how this changes our record of histories--personal, public, civic and national.

In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins* addresses the issue in a chapter called "Photoshop for Democracy." Regarding political activism and pop culture, he suggests that "crystallizing one's political perspectives into a photomontage that is intended for broader circulation is no less an act of citizenship than writing a letter to the editor of a local newspaper that may or may not actually print it. For a growing number of young Americans, images (or more precisely the combination of words and images) may represent as important a set of rhetorical resources as texts" (222).

*Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press, 2006.

END OF POST