The Digital Eye: Photographic Art in the Electronic Age

Product Description The rise of digital photography is perhaps the most manifest legacy of the digital revolution in art. Through the use of sophisticated software and scanners, artists are able to enhance photographs, saturate them with colour, and create mesmerizing effects. Focusing exclusively on digital photography and its enormous varieties of technique and style being practiced today, Sylvia Wolf explores a genre that challenges our notions of the art and the role of the artist. This lavishly illustrated book takes readers from the earliest experiments in digital photography to the latest innovations. Wolf candidly discusses issues of authenticity and narrative and points to technological trends of the future. A global panoply of artists, including Andreas Gursky, Chris Jordan, Loretta Lux, and Lucas Samaras, demonstrates just how diverse and complex the field has become. Today as digital photography is being used by artists to portray unbridled consumption and warn of ecological disaster; as artists employ Photoshop, Google and their own programming skills to create software-cum-art objects; and as seasoned photographers turn from film to their laptops, this volume offers a riveting snapshot of a medium that is changing the way we look at pictures. Review '...this is an invaluable book for those with a digital camera, a computer and an imagination'. --Flipside, May 2010 a thick, quality production filled with large, bold supporting imagery, that should become like the bible for those who like to use their image-editing software for full surrealist effect. --Amateur Photographer, July 2010 From the Inside Flap Photographers who use digital technologies as tools for creative expression are driving the most exciting and transformative developments in today's photography. Digital photographic and imaging technologies are the most recent development in an art and science whose history is one of constant technological innovation. Using sophisticated software and scanners, artists are able to enhance or alter photographs, and create mesmerizing effects. Focusing exclusively on digital photography, Sylvia Wolf explores a medium that challenges our notions of the role of the artist and of an image's relationship to the real. About the Author Sylvia Wolf is Director of the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle. She was formerly an adjunct curator at the Whitney Museum of Art and Photography Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her books include Mapplethorpe Polaroids and Visions from America: Photographs from the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1940-2001, both published by Prestel.