It was 30,000 years ago when someone's hairy ancestor suggested the wall of the cave they called home might look better with a cow-prototype painted upon it. Image-making was born at that moment, and it didn't die with the invention of photography in 1839.

Pictures and picture-makers have always had the scent of magic about them. Those beasts painted on the cave walls may have been intended to influence the gods of the hunt. The Ice Age Frenchman who painted them was probably held in high esteem as a shaman; these are skills that ordinary mortals did not possess!

The invention of photography was not a fortuitous discovery of the Penicillin-from-bread-mold variety. It was eagerly anticipated since 350 B.C., when the design of a camera was proposed by Aristotle. Nascent shutterbugs had a long wait, as Aristotle, with all his wisdom, neglected to turn his attention to "film."

It fell to an international crew of mid-nineteenth century experimenters, members of the landed gentry and visionary entrepreneurs, who were furiously combining different chemical compounds, trying to discover their image-making philosopher's stone. A Frenchman and an Englishman did so, separately, in the late1830's.

The most egalitarian of inventions, photography seemed to smooth over the lines of distinction between the magician and the masses, between the gifted and the gauche. Although its early practitioners used terms which seemed to alienate their art from its human creators ("Heliography," or sun writing; "the hand of God" "mirror-pictures") there was also a very prideful need to proclaim this new medium as equally-capable of artistic expression as its elder cousin, painting.

As soon as this exquisitely literal visual medium was invented, its human operators insisted upon investigating its interpretive powers. With practice, the legerdemain of the camera and the darkroom could alter reality and leave no trace of its handiwork. In 1857, Queen Victoria purchased a photograph, made from 33 separate negatives, of a scene which existed only in the photographer's imagination.

Nothing much happened for the next 130 years. Then someone connected a television to a computer. Researchers tossed away their punch-cards and began to play Pong in their spare time. The digital world became a visual one; the camera and the computer became linked. Photographs can become digital in more than one way:

A conventional, old-fashioned photographic print, slide, or negative can be "digitized" in a scanner OR a new, film-less, directly-digital camera can be used to take the picture, which is then transferred to the computer. In either case, the result is something quite new. Conventional photographs consist of tiny, grainy splotches of gray or color, which, when viewed from a distance, seem to resembled reality. Digital photographs, on the other hand, consist of PIXELS (picture elements) instead of grain. Any one photograph can have many thousands of these; a digital photograph which fills your computer screen probably has more than 30,000 pixels.

Each pixel is represented by a binary number. Within a highest-quality photographic image on a computer, each pixel can have any value from 1 to 16.8 million. Because of the computational power required to deal with such large numbers, powerful computers are required to work with digital photography. Such computers have only recently become available in relatively inexpensive desktop models.

Digital photography requires no film, no chemicals, no darkroom, and (almost) no processing time. All the controls available to the photographer using conventional chemical-based photographic tools and techniques are available within the number-crunching algorithms of the computer. Instead of manually changing the focus, altering the composition, or lightening or darkening parts of the image, the pixels of the image are processed through a mathematical routine which accomplishes the same visual effect.

Photographic manipulation did not begin with the computer; it was present at the beginning. From its earliest days, photography explored the world of the non-literal. The computer has simply reinvented this world of the non-literal and given it the new name of "image processing." The photographers represented in this exhibit are a new generation of artists, showing the maturity which comes from surviving the initial gee-whiz stage of a new technology. There are many different visions to visit. There are lots of pixels.

Howard Goldbaum
Exhibit Curator

Would you like to give "image processing" a try? Check out Digital Photography '96's own "Digital Fauxtography" application, Photoshock© 1.1 . In order to use Photoshock©, you will need the Shockwave plug-in for Macromedia Director files on the web.

A Digital Photography Bibliography.