Why?
Part of the shift from Modernism to Postmodernism was fueled by the digital revolution. As computers became faster, smaller, and more prevalent, global information became more accessible, new digital tools were available to companies and the general public, and the way we all think, speak, and act was changed. Few creative industries were as impacted as design. Photoshop, along with other design and image-manipulation tools, disrupted not only industries, but also our relationship to truth. The world had to start looking and thinking more critically about the veracity of photographic images. In addition, photography’s static nature had to make way for dynamic manifestations including hyperlinked images, GIFs, AI-generated imagery, new cameraless photography fields, and more. Focusing on this drastic shift is important in understanding design disciplines as ever-changing, unstable, and ripe for innovation.
Required
Supplementary Readings
- Timeline
- Photoshop and Design Evolution
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Startup Memories—The Beginning of Photoshop
“In this documentary, the founders of Adobe Photoshop—John Knoll, Thomas Knoll, Russell Brown, and Steve Guttman—tell the story of how an amazing coincidence of circumstances, that came together at just the right time 20 years ago, spawned a cultural paradigm shift unparalleled in our lifetime.”Graphic Means: A History of Graphic Design Production
“Imagine designing and printing a brochure—without a computer. How would you set the type—making sure it fit your layout? How would you crop the images? How would you place those images alongside your text? And what would you hand over to the offset printer when you were done? Up until just 30 years ago when the desktop computer debuted, this whole process would have been primarily done by hand, and with the aide of fascinating machines that used a variety of ways to get type and image on to the printed page.”Before there was Photoshop | graphic design tools | Photoshop 25th anniversary
“Follow along as Sean Adams mocks up a layout with a variety of traditional design tools. Join lynda.com as we celebrate 25 years of Photoshop with inspiring stories from luminaries who have helped shape the most prolific design tool of our time.”The evolution of a tool palette | Photoshop 25th anniversary
“For over two decades, Photoshop has been an essential part of the digital artist’s toolset. To celebrate its 25th anniversary, we’ve taken a look back at Photoshop’s history: from the rise of desktop publishing and digital photography, to the evolution of Photoshop’s tool palette and its sometimes controversial but necessary role in modern photojournalism.” - The Internet
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Evolution of the Web
This interactive timeline of the Internet allows you to see major events, the advent of various browsers, and usage and user figures.Birth of the Internet
"In 1968, the nation’s top computer scientists and members of the U.S. government gathered inside the Rustler Lodge atop the Alta Ski Resort in Salt Lake County, Utah. They were about to change the world. It was during that meeting that this group talked about the novel idea of connecting computers together into the world’s first far-reaching communications network. A year later, four institutions—UCLA, the Stanford Research Institute, University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Utah—became the first “nodes” to that network, then known as ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. It was the precursor to what we now call the internet.”Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
“Filmmaker Werner Herzog presents a history of the internet, starting with its birth in 1969, and ponders the joys and sorrows of its social influence.” - Post-Photography
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Post-Photography: The Unknown Image, Elephant
“The photographic medium has been changing at an unprecedented pace in the last two decades. We now all have a camera in our pockets (or bags, or on our desks) or there’s one hovering over our heads ready to snap our image. So taking a picture, being at the right place at the right time (in the tradition of Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment) is no longer the challenge. In our image-saturated world, the challenge is what to do with all these images, and photographers are finding innovative strategies for dealing with photographic material. For the artist-photographers in this piece, a picture is just a platform, the starting point (or end point) of a lengthy process, taking photography to places it has never been before.”Post-Photography
“The real world is full of cameras; the virtual world is full of images. Where does all this photographic activity leave the artist-photographer? Post-Photography tries to answer that question by investigating the exciting new language of photographic image-making that is emerging in the digital age of anything-is-possible and everything-has-been-done-before. Found imagery has become increasingly important in post-photographic practice, with the internet serving as a laboratory for a major kind of image-making experimentation. But artists also continue to create entirely original works using avant-garde techniques drawn from both the digital and analogue eras. This book is split into six sections - Something Borrowed, Something New, Layers of Reality, Eye-Spy, Material Visions, Post-Photojournalism and All the World Is Staged - which cover the key strategies adopted by 53 of the most exciting and innovative artist-photographers of the 21st century, drawn from all over the world.”Photography after Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age
“Thanks to the tremendous impact of the digital process and its capacity for manipulation, our current notions of what photography is as well as what a photograph represents is changing. Accompanying an international exhibit sponsored by the Siemens Kulturprogramm, this collection of essays brings together a multitude of positions on the subject. For those who do not know much about photographic issues, whether historic or contemporary, this wide-ranging study is an interesting and fruitful place to start. The body of essays review, debate, and probe the potential of new technologies without ignoring the natural interactivity between photography and social norms. In that sense, this book can be read as a platform for cultural as well as artistic speculation. Now that we can technically alter the qualities of what used to be the smallest element, the pixel, we are verging on reinventing all notions of representation.”Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations, Some Considerations, Photography after Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age
“The identification of photography with objectivity is a modern idea, and the fascination with the precision of its rendering has only partly characterized its reception. Certainly, the artistic practice of photography incorporated markers of the effort to evade the mechanicity of ‘straight’ photography. The deceptive manipulation of images is another matter. The use of faked photographs is a long-standing political trick, in the form both of photographs misappropriated or changed after they were produced and in ones set up for the camera. Before lithography enabled newspapers to use photographs directly around 1880, photographs were at the mercy of the engravers who prepared the printing plates for reproduction. Even now cropping and airbrushing are decisive methods of manipulating existing imagery, and set-up or staged (‘restaged’) images are always a possibility.”
Response Questions
Remember to cite specific instances from the text to support your views.
- Photoshop and its ilk have overwritten so many jobs that used to exist 20–30 years ago. That also means that designers, illustrators, and photographers today now do, or know how to do jobs that used to belong to specialists—they wear many hats. Do you see that as a good or bad thing? Why?
- Think back to the readings on Marshall McLuhan and how the medium supercedes the message or individual messages created through the medium. How does this shape your thinking of Photoshop and digital photography?
- Who do you think makes a larger impact on the world, the programmers, engineers, and industrial designers who create design programs, computers, digital cameras, etc., or the artists who use the tools?
- Harkening back to McLuhan again, what does the shift from analog to digital mean? How is that shaping how we think and act? For example, do you have your best friend’s phone number memorized, or is it just in your phone? Ho many physical music albums do you own vs. how many live on the cloud or a hard drive? How do you experience or access those albums? How many photos do you have on your camera/cloud account? How do you parse those?
- In what ways has the internet altered the fabric of our lives? In what ways has it just doubled down on pre-existing structures (power structures, information structures, social structures)?