merchimerch

Oh, I neglected to say: I think there are two schools of thought in photography. Those who are excited by photoshop I think of as doing something akin to sampling in modern music; the result of their work may be entirely divorced, at least from a structural perspective, from the original percept. The photograph supplies only textures which are mapped and remapped to create the secondary, become primary, work. Those who are disturbed by it are, in contrast, are the ultimate performance artists. Their work involves putting themselves in the position to perceive certain things, and the camera is a tool to move the audience's viewpoint. To date, this works best with sight, but other senses are following (I noticed with interest that the music researchers I worked with at McGill were collecting a library of impulse responses of acoustically significant buildings around the world, so that they could reproduce the acoustic experience of simply being in these places—not, of course, that there isn't an obvious artistic and subsequently commercial value in convolving these recordings with musical and verbal performances).