Response to "Composing with Images: Lynn Hershman’s Photography"

In Composing with Images: Lynn Hershman’s Photography, Glenn Kurtz speaks of how the “computer has rendered the old conflict between ‘straight’ photography and image manipulation moot.” I tend to agree with this statement because, with the worldwide adoption of digital photography and photographic editing, even “straight” photographs which are the “impartial representation of facts,” would cease to be ‘factual’ with even a simple modification such as red-eye removal. This fits in with his belief that “digital technology already treats photographs as raw material.” The readiness and ease of digital photograph manipulation has been, in my opinion, one of the leading draws of the digital medium – The ability to clean up or even add to an image instead of having to make due simply with what you captured.

Take the above picture, for example. The image is of Korean actress Song Hye Kyo – While this picture appears to be, in every way, a factual depiction of this actress, in reality it is a completely fabricated, constructed image. Indonesian CG artist Max Edwin Wahyudi took numerous existing photographs of the actual actress and made a stunningly accurate three-dimensional digital rendering. In a way, it is similar to how Hershman created the character of ‘Roberta Breitmore’ by photographing real staged scenes and accompanying them with false documentation of her existence, except in the case of Song Hye Kyo, her existence is real but the image is forged. Examples like this make audiences question what is truly definable as “real.”