A more serious response to this thread-
Whatever technique one uses to make art is likely to become
intimately a part of what you end up making.
The Portraits of the American Dead are tied to digital methods in a
number of ways and it seems to me unlikely that I would have come up
with this particular work or even anything all that like it if it
were not for the certain particularities of digital photography.
First, I took literally thousands of pictures of a non-subject, which
I kept in an easily accessible form and then looked at, some tens of
thousands of frames, over the course of several months. It was fairly
obsessive and time consuming, but much, much easier than pursuing a
similar course with film. I suppose if I were using film I might have
come up with some similarly painstaking task, but it would have been
something else entirely and the result would have been different.
This may be risky in this particular forum, but one of photography's
salient characteristics as a medium for expression is that it *does
not* require an enormous amount of technical expertise to allow one
to create interesting pictures. And digital photography requires even
less than film. Brute force *is* an option!
***********************
New gallery here:
<http://www.ahayesphoto.com/figurestudy/index.htm>
--
Alan P. Hayes
Meaning and Form: Writing, Editing and Document Design
Pittsfield, Massachusetts
Photographs at
http://www.ahayesphoto.com/americandead/index.htm
http://del.icio.us/ahayes
