An Interview with Steven Friedman
INTERVIEWER: We are here today with Steven Friedman, who is a digital artist to discuss “What do you call Digital Art”. Over the past decade Digital Art has moved more into the mainstream but there still seems to be a lot of confusion as to what to call it. Some call it Digital Painting, virtual painting, photo manipulation, and a whole host of other names. What would you like people to call art done on the computer or done with a combination of photography and computer manipulation techniques?
STEVEN: Personally I think just Digital Art is fine, but I do take strong exception to Photo Manipulation as a label for my artwork.
INTERVIEWER: Why is that?
STEVEN: To begin with, the photography is just a very small part of the whole process I use, and secondly, the final piece does not represent anything photographic. I also want people to view the work as a painting and not try to see how I derived it from a photograph. Photo manipulation also just sounds derogatory and somewhat misleading to me.
INTERVIEWER: But isn’t it a photograph?
STEVEN: Well, in the same sense that both Sculpture and Pottery are both derived from clay, but no one in their right mind would go around calling them manipulated clay. I take issue with the fact that it tends to confuse the viewer. I recently won an award for digital photography. The piece I submitted looked nothing at all like a photograph, but did look very painterly as I intended it to look. It really pissed off the digital photographers who rightly said it was a painting. What you call it I think is important because it helps the viewer put it into context. When we view different mediums, we have certain expectations about how it looks and what makes it successful in that medium. I am willing to play in that arena, albeit that my approach and tools are different. What is most important is whether or not it comes off successfully in that representation.
INTERVIEWER: You say you’ve coined the term “Digital Natural Media to describe the set of processes you use”. Isn’t that misleading?
STEVEN: Probably no more so than Digital Oils or Virtual Watercolor. When I coined the term I mainly wanted to get away from the label of Digitally Manipulated Photography, or just Digital Photography.
INTERVIEWER: Where do you feel the distinction lies then between photographs that have been manipulated digitally by the computer and work such as the type you do?
STEVEN: I feel it mostly lies in the artists’ intent. If a photographer wants the viewer to see it as a photograph, I think Digital Photograph or even just Photograph is fine. There seems to be a battle on now between the Wet-side photographers who still use photo chemicals and film and the dry-side guys who work digitally. Frankly it seems pretty Lilliputian to me. Much of the banter seems to be around who is more archival. I feel that whether a photograph is done with a CMOS chip and inkjet printer or Film and photographic paper is irrelevant. The important thing is how successful is the artwork seen as a photograph. Emphasizing how long it lasts seems pretty lame to me! But getting back to manipulated images. In some ways all photography is manipulated photography. Even Ansel Adams manipulated his photography to change the way the viewer perceived it. Some years ago I saw a show of works that he had reprinted along side the original printings and it was as though I was looking at two entirely different photographs. Dwayne Michaels was doing manipulated photography long before computers were in the mainstream, and did it very successfully. He didn’t feel the need to distinguish it with another adjective. I feel anything akin to what you could do in a darkroom still falls under the banner of straight photography. Even collaging images and cloning parts in or out still is straight photography since you are still presenting it as a photographic representation. There does come a point though where you have changed the nature of the image to such a degree that it changes the perception of the viewer toward seeing it as something other than the starting point. Collage is a great example of this. In collages I very often see photographic images embedded in them and then embellished with Acrylic glazes and such. Is this a photograph? In some sense yes, but the way the image was presented really transcends our perception of photographic and requires us to view it as a different class of medium.
INTERVIEWER: Do you feel that Digital or Computer Art is some how looked down upon in the art world?
STEVEN: Unfortunately yes, but I think perceptions are starting to change. A while back I was at an art show and one of the artists had art work made up of Xerox images collaged together. He had a sign on his booth that said something like “No Computer !” or “No Digital Work!”. Right! Like somehow Xerography is somehow a more valid artistic medium than digital! Lets get real here! The computer is simply a tool of artistic expression just as a Xerox machine or industrial laser, or even chain saw. It’s foolish to uplift one tool above others and say “well this is really more of an artistic tool than that.”
INTERVIEWER: How do you feel Digital Artists should categorize their work without being misleading?
STEVEN: That’s a loaded question. What would you term misleading?
INTERVIEWER: Well, to distinguish it from other mediums.
STEVEN: Until the computer came along and enabled artists to exactly copy to same look and feel of other mediums, this wasn’t really an issue. You just didn’t see that kind of mimicry. I suppose maybe photorealism came closest, but you could almost always distinguish it as a painting as opposed to a photograph, and since painters were in a more prestigious class of artists they wouldn’t want their work to be seen as photographs. But to be fair, I think digital artists should use the digital moniker as an adjective to distinguish it from a true watercolor or oil painting if nothing more than to placate the judges at art shows.
INTERVIEWER: So digital watercolor, or digital oil would be OK in your estimation.
STEVEN: I confess it stretches the concept a bit, but yes, I do, because I believe that the intention and ability of the artist to present a work in that context is in a way a more truthful depiction of that artwork than a detailed description of the tools and processes.
INTERVIEWER: I’d like to thank you for being here tonight to discuss this subject and wish you the best in your artistic endeavors.
STEVEN: Thank you.