Ruud van Empel
I actually completely stopped taking photos during the ’90s, because it didn’t interest me and it took too long, and that interest revived when the digital camera came. I was very happy when the computer came and Photoshop came. I remember when I saw it the first time, I was really amazed that I could do everything right there. I couldn’t sleep anymore, from that moment on.
I bought my computer in 1995 and started doing Photoshop. The first idea I had was that I wanted actually to make a picture completely like reality, but one that’s completely montaged. I wanted to control the image completely. I wanted to create my own people. I had so many ideas coming up of what I could do, suddenly.
What I do now is I make a sketch of the idea, basically, that’s just the simple idea. And I take all kinds of photos, and I’m not sure if I’m going to use them, but those things I never know at first. So I have a few ideas of what I want to do, and work with that, and start from there. But how it looks in details is something that arises during the process, when I’m making it. If there is a person in the image, I start with the face first. That’s the most important part, also the most difficult part. That could be like 100 or 200 layers, itself. The mouth, the lips—the mouth can be like 20 montages. So when that’s done, I make it one layer, and then I start on the body, and that could be also like 100 layers. When that’s finished, I start to do the background. Then, again, you have a few hundred layers. And sometimes it doesn’t work out. So I have to do a few different backgrounds or change the idea or change the whole composition. So sometimes I’m working for months, and I end up with no results. That’s possible. It happens. What I do, when it’s completely finished, the image, I put a grain all over it before it’s printed. So that brings everything together. I think because of the digital possibilities, you want to do different things. That goes for me, because you can create so many things. I wouldn’t be doing this, I think, with an analog technique. I can really make things realistic in the way I had imagined them to be. It’s inspiring.
Richard Benson, Mark Bussell, John Cohen, David Goldblatt, Jerome Liebling, Platon, and Stephen Wilkes
BENSON:
I think Photoshop is a tremendous, tremendous tool. It’s a digital Swiss Army knife, and you can have stuff sitting on your desk and chop it up and leave it there. So, to me, it’s this incredibly versatile tool.
WILKES:
It’s like being a writer and never having had a thesaurus, and suddenly, somebody’s given you this wonderful tool to have all these other words, so you can express yourself in a much deeper way.
GOLDBLATT:
On the computer screen, if I want to burn in or hold back tiny details, or bigger details, I can do so very selectively. The rest of the image is quiescent. Nothing is happening to it. It’s simply there. Whereas in the dark-room, of course, it’s accumulating light. So, if I have, as in one photograph, I think there must be about 12 pairs of eyes under a midday sun in Africa, I can go to each one of those eye sockets, if I have to, and lighten it or change the contrast within it.
COHEN:
I’ve done a little bit of Photoshop and all that. I know the things that you can do. You can work much, much slower on a print.
LIEBLING:
With the digital, you could stop and say, hey, OK. Now leave it, and we’ll come back. I’ve gone back to the negatives and just found such riches.
The thing that I object to with digital is Photoshop. I think if you want to make pictures, you want to be a painter…well that’s fine, go ahead and do it, but don’t call it photography. Photography meant there was a response to the fact of life. [With Photoshop] what you’re saying is, I don’t really need the world; I can make the world. And artists, painters, have been doing that for many, many years. But then I go back to that essence that I thought photography as mirror image was very important and special.
SIMON:
In many ways digital is closer to painting than it is to photography, because you can keep going back to the work over and over again. You can keep adding and subtracting—and returning to it for changes. It can be visited again and again, as one would a painting. It’s more handmade, and less about the moment.
In my work, I use Photoshop in a limited form—mostly to allow a digital image to look like film. Endless hours are wasted trying to achieve what I formerly achieved on film.
BENSON:
When you manipulate pictures on the computer, you have as much time as you want to do what you want, and it’s absolutely wonderful. And in the darkroom, you might have been strapped with time a little bit, but the real problem of the darkroom is you were in the dark, and there’s nothing more ridiculous than making pictures in the dark.
I also think that if you’re a practicing artist, and you’re making pictures, and you’re making photographs, you should make them quickly. They’re not like painting. They’re something you make quickly. And I think if you can’t tune a picture on a computer in five minutes, you should throw it away and make another picture. And the idea that people will sit and spend a couple of hours working on a picture is unbelievably stupid to me.
Also, people who work with multiple layers, which is something that Photoshop is great at, they do manipulations in layers with an idea that you can go back and undo things, and that’s an absolutely fundamental lack of faith in yourself to make a permanent decision. And so to my mind, that’s stupid, too. I think if I was compositing or collaging, I might spend more time at it. But you see, those pictures are being made by somebody who’s more interested in the inside of their mind, and the way it can generate a picture, than the way the world can generate a picture, so that’s a fundamental difference in approach. I think the world is much more interesting than what I think, and that doesn’t mean everybody has to feel that, but that’s what I feel.
PLATON:
It is liberating. It’s an incredible tool, but I’m only interested in what I want to say with it. The danger with Photoshop is it’s infinite, and the worst thing I believe you can do, when you sit down at the computer, is not know where you want to take your image. You should never sit and say, “Well, I’ll dial up the contrast. No, I’ll dial it down. I’ll saturate it. No, I’ll desaturate it.” You’re going to be lost very quickly. So what you have to do, before you sit down, is almost switch off the lights and ask yourself the very difficult question, what do I want to say? Can I see it in my head first? And then you sit down, and you use the tools to chase your idea, but if you don’t have an idea, then the technique is dominating what you’re doing.
WILKES:
There’s this sense that you were almost operating in a universe as opposed to a solar system. There is no boundary, anymore, about where we can go or what you want to do. I want to share a story. When I launched the inkjet technology with Epson, I worked with Nash Editions. Mac Holbert was the printer, and he had worked with Horace Bristol, who was a wonderful Life magazine photographer. Horace, I believe, was in his eighties, and he sat down at a computer, and Mac was printing his work for the first time, digitally, and Mac said to him, “Hey, Horace, what do you want to do in this print?” And he says, “Well, Mac, you know that knee was always too bright. Do me a favor, just darken that down.” And Mac took the wand, and went whoosh. And all of a sudden, he hears this guy—he hears like crying, he’s all choked up, and he turns and looks back at Horace, and he says, “Are you OK, Horace? Is everything OK?” He says, “I’m OK, Mac,” he