Still Life (Manipulations) is a series of photographs that explores the duality that photography is simultaneously used as a tool for capturing truth as well as a vessel for discrete augmentation, artifice, and manipulation. While photography is commonly seen as a medium for capturing authentic moments, truth and reality – its history reveals a problematic lineage of photomanipulation with the intent of deceiving audiences through staging, editing or framing images to augment ‘the real’. Notions of ‘the real’ are twisted as the outcome of these photographs visually portrays uncanny/unreal versions of physical reality while representing deeper truths about the nature of ‘the real’ in a postdigital era.
Contemporarily, with the inception of digital photography, Photoshop and other photo editing programs or apps; photographic manipulation is ubiquitous, often expected and as easy as a click of a button on our phones or computers. Whether this is through subtle crops, the seamless use of Facetune, uncanny Deepfakes, facial-tracking filters, or methods that are not photographic at all such as virtual modeling technologies – artifice is constantly proven to be a part of our pictorial language. The aim of my project is to reveal the abundance of artifice itself, through select modes of augmentation which are explicitly employed to exaggerate the work of digital manipulation. Through this series, I aim to reveal the interconnection of physical and virtual reality through overt traces of digital manipulation. Using traditional still life flower arrangements as my subject, connotations of purity, truth and life are twisted to show ‘the real’ in a digitally prominent era. Each photograph in the series incorporates commonly used Photoshop tools and effects such as clone stamp, hues, opacity, paint and even the select tool in ironically subtle yet obvious ways.
Lines between what is real and what is fake is blurred in Still Life (Manipulations). Ultimately, revealing how digital manipulation or composite images can offer new ways of documenting ‘the real’ beyond physical reality.
