Fascinating Examples of Digital Photo Manipulations in the Arts

Margi Geerlinks in her 1998 piece 'Girl knitting baby', works within the space of manipulated yet intricately detailed realistic photographic images. Her images are obviously digital photo manipulated, not through the extent of abstraction, but through the unnatural morphing of objects. During this particular piece, Geerlinks depicts a young woman dreamily staring out beyond the frame of the image as she is knitting from a ball of yarn. The form of the woven wool transforms into the human sort of an infant's lower body and legs. An illusionary symbol to the knitter’s day-dream contemplation and desires for a toddler, depicting a component of popular culture arts.

 

Similarly with Jeff Wall's 1992 piece titled 'The Giant', where two photographs of differing scale are combined into one image, creating a disparity of size between the objects depicted within. These otherwise random images of what appears to be a stair case between levels within a library or similar, juxtaposed with an unrelated image of a standing naked elderly female, holding what appears to be a paper note. Like Geerlings piece, Walls has positioned the secondary object into the background at an appropriate place and firmly fixed it with shadows through digital photo manipulation. During this piece Walls has the naked female together with her feet fixed to the ground, leaving the viewer to work out and define the narrative between the disparate objects within.

 

Nick Knight also similarly to Aziz and Cucher, has created manipulated images that combine human forms and attributes, with other computer generated or manipulated surroundings that resemble body shapes. In his work 'Dolls' 1999, Knight applies computer generated body, hair and face markings, thereto of a young female face. In so doing he creates an almost painterly appearance that leaves the viewer with a sensual tension between femininity and therefore the decorative. In another piece titled 'Sweet' 2000, Knight Overlays manipulated ambiguous eclectic images over another female head and shoulder portrait. During this piece he creates a fragile tapestry, challenging the connection between form and wonder. Both of those pieces by Knight, while obviously created through digital photo manipulation of otherwise random images, have resulted within the creation of works with an illusory richness of colour and form.

 

Tibor Kalman in his 1993 sensational ground breaking work on race rocked the establishment press of the time. He delivered to the eye and exposed to the general public at large, the relative simple digital photo manipulation, challenging their established beliefs in photography as a truism as being not valid, the joining again of Politics and art. In his pieces titled 'Queen Elizabeth what if...?' and 'Michael Jackson what if...?' Kalman changed the skin colours of his subjects, to boost awareness on how people are categorized consistent with their skin tones. Ironically, Jackson in real world did undergo such a metamorphosis, to which the overall public reacted with abhorrence at this slant to popular culture arts. Kalman's work although not involving manipulation of multiple images, did play a crucial role in educating the general public at large on the potential future with digital photo manipulation.