As Roger and I, and all really acceptable photographers will tell you, (over and over till you get sick of hearing it) that light (without which there would be no image) makes the photograph, painting, whatever succeed or fail. I could easily make an argument for light being the end all and be all for ANY KIND OF ART. So I will.
Take a nice beautiful 7 carrot blue-white diamond, put that diamond in really bad light and what do you have? A rock, or worse yet just some well cut glass. The point being that everything we perceive with our eyes needs light reflecting off of a surface for us to see it; change the light, change what you see. Now the game has changed, Now that we have invented the “transparency,” we have radically changed how we can see, perceive, and interpret color and shape. We have taken the need for “being there,” at the moment of occurrence, to being able see or witness something at a later date.
We no longer need light hitting an object and bouncing off of it to “see” something; we can put a light source behind some kind of transparent medium, that has variations of color or of grey that light can travel through and there you have it. You now have a representation of something—it is not the Thing though. Once you leave behind the object that light is actually bouncing from to your eyes, and move on to this other method/mode of perception, you rely on someone else’s IDEA/conception of what this object was, or felt like to the person who created the IMAGE of the object, at that moment in time! This is very important. Once you are not looking at the object yourself, you are looking at someone else’s interpretation of that object!
So, enter Photoshop, and its lessers, and the ability to, for lack of a better word, lie. Well, isn’t that one of the big complaints? Especially by those who have noted some of the deleterious effects of its use in much of advertising, and I DO agree with them in this, Photoshop has been used to make people appear more perfect than is attainable without endangering a person’s life. But, I am not here to talk about that, that is a different subject, and one I have hit on multiple times already.
The reason for Photoshop to even exist is because of that backlit transparency development. We, I, change what was, to what “may have been/could be” by moving light and color, Photoshop allows us to do this; not only does it allow us to do this but it lets us do this with such precision that 99.9% of the people who see an image of mine will never know (without the metadata to look at) what is “real” and what is not. What do I mean by “real?” Simply, what my camera recorded, with minor adjustment for color, sharpness, lens distortion correction, all attempts on my part to make the image more like what (MY) eyes saw, at the moment I hit the shutter button. A recording of a moment in time, nothing more.
Now we come to the two images that this post is ostensibly about: Roger Gauthier’s Image, his on the left, my version obviously the other. The Pixel count is the same, CMYK (if you work in that space) the same base colors, but greyed or burned, other than that they are the same color. So it IS the same image. Well no it was. Now It should at lease Feel Different, I hope very different. I did hold back somewhat, or not hold back but backtracked in my history to the point that you see, because I had gotten to the point of adding things that did NOT belong in an image I had chosen to just modify. I had gotten to the point of creating a whole new image, and that was not my intent.
Emotional content/feel, those are what Roger and I created. To me his image is light and positive, lighter colors with some intense reds in places, not a hot red but a living red as in a rose. This is a place of color and life. At this moment, there are not many people around, but I can see that at times there would be, and they would enjoy the area, light and bright, with implications for social interaction. In short, a place to “enjoy” the process of moving through.
My version on the other hand, is not currently a place of joy. Maybe it was, maybe it will be again, but not now, not at this moment. This is a place to move through, to pick up the pace, not to linger, not to stop and have a conversation. Echoes are more muffled, by the high shadows, sounds don’t carry as far, they are absorbed in the darker reaches. Even the destination is somewhat in question it is a deeper red, an angry red. To me this space says move on, go, get where you want to be, just not here. GO!
Color: it’s a lot of fun to mess with, and an easy way to mess with peoples emotions.
James Longster, © 2015
A Tail Of Two Images.
