Splash #2

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Digital Photography / Image Manipulation

The temptation to modify photographs is as old as the medium itself – only methods have changed. Digital technology, because more accessible, has made us more clearly aware of the manipulability of the photographic image. If many criticize today’s use of digital manipulation as causing prejudice to the visual truth originally conveyed by the photo camera, it appears more obvious today that the old saying “the camera never lies” has always been photography’s greatest myth.

In the photo selection presented in Splash #2 event, none of the series dismisses the use of digital manipulation, rather the contrary. It is at the core of their process of examining the impact of digital technologies on traditional representations.

By assembling selected scenes of photos taken on the street, modifying a family picture, re-appropriating existing images or expanding a landscape image, these photographers were not seeking to deceive us or to embellish reality for the sake of beauty but to pursue a personal fantasy, explore the inner self, revisit a particular memory, order the world in their own way or question identity issues, contemporary societies and urban lives mutations. All these projects incite us to contemplate and rethink our encounters, by means of introspection or by looking outward at our world.

SELECTED ARTISTS

Leigh Merrill
Into the Sunset
www.leighmerrill.com
Each image is typically made from tens to hundreds of bits and pieces of different photographs. When viewing the pictures there is a moment when one cannot distinguish truth from fiction and at that point, the image stops being about the illusion or technique used to create the photograph but about what is depicted. When we cannot tell truth from fiction, it is because both are part of our reality.



Robert Rickhoff
Out of Place
www.robertrickhoff.com
A humorous interpretation of the urban architecture.



Xavier Delory
Formes urbaines / Urban Forms
www.xavierdelory.be
This photographic work explores the landscape in mutation and the drifts of modern man.



Pelle Cass
Selected People
www.pellecass.com
Scrupulously additive because nothing has been changed in the original scene, only selected, these composite photographs examine particular places over time, revealing a surprising world that is visible only with a camera.



Reinier Gerritsen
Wall Street Stop
www.reiniergerritsen.nl
Each shot is a construction with several images of the same people taken within seconds and then digitally stitched together to get everybody in focus. The photos were taken in the subway, between Wall Street and Grand Central Station in the New York banking district, in 2009, when the financial crisis was at its peak, documenting the commuters mood at the time.



Kelli Connell
Double Life
www.kelliconnell.com
By digitally creating a photograph that is a composite of multiple negatives of the same model in one setting, the self is exposed not as a solidified being in reality, but as a representation of social and interior investigations that happen within the mind.



Wendy McMurdo
In a Shaded Place
www.wendymcmurdo.com
In a Shaded Place (later subtitled ‘The digital and the Uncanny’) was first shown in the UK in 1995. Intended to be a project that looked at the impact of the then evolving digital culture on identity, the project also explored the impact of digital culture itself on the medium of photography itself.



Jennifer Greenburg
Revising History
www.jennifergreenburg.com
Questioning the reality of a snapshot and how it operates in relationship with original memories led Jennifer Greenburg to explore the concept of counterfeit photography through her “Revising History” series.



Moira Ricci
20.12.53 – 10.08.04
www.gallerialaveronica.it
Photography becomes the way we can meet in an illusion. After my mother’s death, I transposed myself into an image to be able to be near her and watch her, dressed and with her hair styled more or less in the way of the time the photo was taken, in the simple and modest way she always dressed.



Nicolas Dhervillers
Tourists / Sentimental Archives / Hommages
www.nicolasdhervillers.com
These photgraphs are forming a trilogy. The body of pictures examine a particular dimension linked to the notion of appropriation and pretence in contemporary photography.



Andres Donadio
Paysages augmentés
www.andresdonadio.com
Photos were taken with an old Point and Shoot camera and the files I had were low resolution jpegs. A repetition of motifs blended in different ways within the image and increases the spatial context in which the photo was taken. I wanted to bring back to life the memories of those places.




+ Live soundscape: Seppe VAN DEN BERGHE
www.seppevandenberghe.com