The Digital Studio
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A visit to a photographer's studio usually involves a multitude of cameras, lights and darkroom equipment. A visit to Frank Gillette's SoHo studio is quite different. It is stuffed with high-end computers, scanners, storage systems, monitors and printers. Gillette practices cameraless photography. The idea has existed since the early days of photo- graphy. In 1839, Henry Fox Talbot created cameraless photographs by placing plants on sensitized paper and exposing both to light. Robert Rauschenberg produced X-ray images of his body in the 1960s.
After Adobe introduced Photoshop for the Macintosh computer in 1990, artists like Gillette began to work with this new technology to create digital images without the use of a camera. Coming from a painting and video installation background, he composes his pictures from a multitude of images derived from his own photography or from sources that include art history, drawings, newspapers, magazines, catalogues and television. The finished compositions are constructed of hundreds of these parts, arranged in several overlaid layers. After composition, Gillette works close-up on the image, altering it with Photoshop filters and further recomposing the picture. The finished compositions contain a huge amount of visual information, but the image sources are not longer visible. Ambiguity would be a good word to describe the result. Each viewer has his own idea of the image based on his interpretation of the different parts. The finished images are enlarged to printing size on two separate computers and then printed. Gillette uses a a normal inkjet printer for smaller images and creates the images used for exhibitions on commercial iris (giclee) or digital chromogenic printers. Cameraless photography allows Gillette to go beyond the bounds of the traditional film and lens system. He defines himself as being between the realist and the abstract photographers. He creates his own reality or abstraction. For instance, in his recent “Dogs of War” he tries to express horror without being too literal about it--there are no specific images of horror in the picture, yet the result is distinctly unsettling. In going beyond cameras, Gillette allows himself creative freedom while still maintaining a connection to the world of photography. |
