Photoshop Remix

In 1854, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Men have become the tools of their tools” in the first chapter of Walden. Part of the genius of the statement, like with any great literature, is its adaptability to issues beyond its own time. Thoreau wrote the statement as part of a larger argument in Walden in which he lamented the detachment of man from nature. His thesis has lasting appeal, as people have continued to feel controlled by technological advancements. While my visual argument does not suggest that people need to contemplate nature as a cure for the modern (postmodern) condition, it does update Thoreau’s belief in a loss of control at the hands of our own creations. Whereas Thoreau lamented the railroad, I lament the laptop, among other things.

Janet H. Murray (2003) argues in “Inventing the Medium,” that scholars have not been “inventing the postmodern condition—they were merely chronicling it, registering and giving for to the cultural anxiety caused by the loss of faith in the great human meta-narratives of sacred and secular salvation” (p. 8). My argument attempts a visual expression of the cultural anxiety we feel from being tethered to our devices, such as cell phones, laptops, and navigation systems—even when we think they are helping us. The idea of being “wireless” masks the underlying understanding that we are actually totally “wired” most of the time and seldom set aside our technological toys.

While brainstorming ideas of ways to depict a person as “wired” to something that controlled him, I thought of a marionette with its strings held by an unseen hand, resulting in the central image in my argument. The original businessman image (from Adobe Stock Photos--at top of post) is funny, pathetic, and slightly disturbing. I chose this image from about five pictures of marionettes because of its humor and because it was easy to manipulate for my composition. The original picture does not have anything holding the strings, so I was able to cut and paste images of the “tools” I thought expressed the dilemma of modern man—and woman. I had to extend the length of the strings using the clone tool to make the scale look right, and I also used the liquefy/warp/pinch tool to make the strings look like they were moving. The image was fairly complete on a white background, but I thought that including the stage not only added dimensionality, but developed a metaphor of man as a puppet on a world stage.

I think simplicity is the composition’s greatest strength. The argument is immediately recognizable, which was my driving goal. While working, I kept repeating to myself the famous quote, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” (Note—in class I attributed it to Oscar Wilde, but it is from Hamlet, which is rather far off the mark!) A visual argument’s strength relies on its ability to explain itself, which doesn’t mean that a reader shouldn’t be able to discover layered metaphors in a visual composition, but that less truly is more.

The composition’s weakness stems mostly from my newness to Photoshop. If I were more experienced, I would smooth the line between the man and the stage better. There is still something about the contrast at the top of the stage curtain and the foregrounded objects that I dislike, but I don’t have the skill to know how to fix it. I did adjust the contrast of the shadow in the curtain top, but I think adding the drop shadow to the man and strings part of the image was the greatest improvement I made to blending the layers.

I am especially pleased with how the keys turned out. I felt that I wanted to develop my visual metaphors beyond the man, the “tools,” and the stage, which for a while had me trying to make the fabric on the curtains look like binary code. A better choice, and easier, was to spell out the quote on computer keys. I started by making a blank key one from an image of a key in Adobe Stock Photos (at top of this post).

Now that the blank key is on this page without the text on it, I can see where I could have better blurred where I erased the original text on the key. I tried to use the burn tool there, but it became too dark. No matter, because in the final composition, the flaw is not noticeable. I chose the font on the keys to try to look as much like that on computer keys as I could. When I added Thoreau’s name below, I chose a font style that resembles an old typewriter’s style for contrast. Also, I added the date of the quote in order to comment on how these anxieties in our culture are far from new.

My project uses Photoshop to comment on cultural anxieties we all feel, a move which has implicit irony; I use a sophisticated medium (that caused me stress) to comment on the stress we feel from our technology. I felt this irony while creating my project, especially when I considered how Lev Manovich (2003) calls Photoshop the “key software application of postmodernism” (p. 24). Even more thought-provoking, Manovich (2003) warns that as

digital and network media rapidly become an omnipresent in our society, and as most artists come to routinely use these new media, the field is facing a danger of become a ghetto whose participants would be united by their fetishism of latest computer technology, rather than by any deeper conceptual, ideological or aesthetic issues—a kind of local club for photo enthusiasts. (p. 14-15)

My project, however, should not be relegated to a scholarly ghetto (though the voice in my head wonders if blogs are often just that). Even though my creative process was not at all similar to how I approach an essay, my argument is not irrelevant because it doesn’t depend on written text. While there are similarities to written composing in how I layer ideas and develop arguments, for the visual argument, I wanted immediate impact. I needed a completeness in my visual design that could be readily seen—which is not to say that a written composition does not also need immediate impact, but that with a visual composition, the impact must be felt by the audience much more quickly. My rhetorical choices depend on arrangement even more than a text-based argument would, and my argument’s authority depends on design. In sum, I used the same rhetorical canons as I would in a written text—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—but rely more on arrangement than I would have in a traditional essay.

References

Murray, J. H. (2003). Inventing the Medium. In The New Media Reader. Eds. Wardrip-Fruin, N., & Montfort, N. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Manovich, L. (2003). New Media from Borges to HTML. In The New Media Reader. Eds. Wardrip-Fruin, N., & Montfort, N. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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