Digital Photo Manipulation – Is it Art?
Digital photo manipulation for artistic creations has its own history, also reaching far back into the early life of photography. Long before the early development of digital media, and the resulting computer hardware and software, that transformed the ease and the depth of manipulation achievable for politics and art, artists physically transformed their images through simple collage. The American photographic artist Allen Dutton during the 1960’s and 70’s created fragmented yet intriguing photographic collages. Dutton usually composed the collages from ‘found’ photographs, cropped and pieced together to form interventions with a landscape, and then re-photographed to remove evidence of the collaging process that he had utilized. Digital photo manipulated works such as ‘Plausible Humbuggery of the perspective’ and ‘Who said sculpture was dull’ depict human body parts in unusual arrangements, set in landscapes both rural and urban. Dutton’s work could be considered transitional, as an
