Photography Transformed--By Pixels

This is one section of an article about technology in the visual arts at the University of Washington. Click here for the complete article.

For Professor Paul Berger, chair of the Photography Program, technology is nothing new. After all, he says, photography has always been technological.

	Paul Berger. Photo by Mary Levin.

It was born at the height of the industrial revolution, when there was a huge onslaught of ways to record and manipulate events from the actual world,” he explains. “It has always ridden a strange and uncomfortable boundary line between art and science.” But Berger readily admits that digital technology has had a huge impact on photography.

To fully appreciate the possibilities of digital photography, it helps to understand traditional analog photography. Photographic film—coated with an emulsion of chemicals that react to light—is a crucial ingredient in analog photography. The level of detail within an analog photograph can be infinite, says Berger, because the film constitutes a physical object. Digital photography, in contrast, arbitrarily divides an image into artificial units—pixels—and jumps from one to the next.

“The fantastic advantage of this,” says Berger, “is that once you divide the image into those units, it is easy to apply mathematical operations.” In other words, you can manipulate it in some pretty mind-boggling ways.

Berger first introduced digital technology into the School of Art in 1985, as individual computers began making their way to campus. As part of a major Olympus grant from IBM to the UW, he acquired a Targa board that allowed images from a videocamera to be translated into pixels that could be manipulated. “At that time, it was the only way we could get a digital image,” Berger recalls. “There was no software for working with these images. We actually wrote some. We were the only people in the Art Building with computers.”

Now Berger is content to use popular software programs, which his students use as well. “We introduce both digital and analog tools right off the bat,” he says. “It’s important that students know how to make both traditional analog prints and digital prints. Some students use digital simply to create a great ‘straight’ print; others use it to change the way we describe the world.”

What can digital do that analog cannot? “You can do color manipulations that are extremely sophisticated,” Berger says. “You can make corrections, like sharpening an image. You can make room-size displays, which were previously limited by the size of chemical processors. Even at this mundane level, digital technology has transformed photography.”

But photos can also be altered or combined to create images that no longer simply record reality but challenge it. That’s also been true with analog photography, Berger points out, but “now you can do some extremely invasive things that alter ‘photographic’ description of reality.”

Berger says his own work, which involves assembling photographic images into “big weavings of imagery,” would be virtually impossible to create without digital technology. “Even if you start using digital technology just to make better prints,” he says, “it soon leads off into new directions.”

Next section: New Methods for Metals

[Autumn 2003 - Table of Contents]