Ryan Shaw May 8th, 2007

Competitive Photoshopping: Creative Strategies Old and New

Among the many discourses circulating around the “newness” of new media is one focused on “digitality” (Lister et al. 2003) or numerical representation (Manovich 2001). A focus on the digital nature of the material substrate underlying new media calls attention to its ease of manipulation in comparison to analog media, and the potential for automated algorithmic manipulation. Unlike analog media, digital media can be copied and changed without touching the original, and certain pieces of a document can be changed without touching the remainder. These qualities make it relatively easy to create new documents out of fragments of existing ones, a practice often referred to as “remix.” The ubiquity on the Internet of documents constructed from pieces of existing ones has led many scholars and pundits to conclude that we are living in a “remix culture” or even a “remix era” (Manovich 2007).

The digital manipulation of photographs, in which new images are constructed from layers and pieces of existing ones, is among the many diverse practices grouped under the rubric of “remix culture.” But as Lister points out, this reworking of existing images to create new ones can be understood as a “meta-form” of pre-digital photographic processes. Photographs and movies constantly refer to earlier images, borrowing and mimicking their styles and symbols (Lister 1995).

In this paper, I will attempt to show a different kind of continuity that digital photo manipulation shares with the past. By applying Medhurst and DeSousa's framework for analyzing political cartoons (Medhurst & DeSousa 1981) to the digital images created and shared on a popular photo manipulation website, I will demonstrate that many of these practices typically understood as paradigmatically “new” can be seen as continuous with a tradition of handmade visual statements that dates back to the 18th

century. I will go on to identify certain strands of practice that cannot be made to fit within this framework. I argue that these latter practices do represent a break with the past, and as such belong to an authentically new category of visual media authoring.

Digital photo manipulation

Digital tools for manipulating bitmapped images have existed since the early 1960s (Sutherland 1964), but it was the release of Adobe Photoshop in 1990 that brought digital image manipulation to the masses. Since then image manipulation has become so strongly associated with the program that its name has become a generic verb, and the digital manipulation of photographs is commonly referred to as “Photoshopping.” Of course, the manipulation of photographs predates digital technology. In the early 1970s, well before digital photo manipulation made its way out of computer labs, Susan Sontag wrote of photographs being “reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out.” (Sontag 1977). But it is clear that digital technology has made these processes faster and easier. Where once these activities were limited to professional photo editors with access to specialized tools, today amateurs and professionals alike engage in photo editing just for fun.

Among the offerings at the popular entertainment website Something Awful is Photoshop Phriday,1 which “showcases the tremendous image manipulation talents of the Something Awful Forum Goons,” site

1 http://www.somethingawful.com/d/Photoshop-phriday/

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participants who produce images focused on a particular theme each week. iStockphoto, an online archive of royalty-free images contributed by members, encourages site participation through its “Steel Cage battles,” in which pairs of members take turns manipulating one another's images, hoping to be judged as the most skillful by a panel of judges.2 There are even sites dedicated solely to such contests like Worth1000, which advertises itself as “the top creative competition and Photoshop contest site on the web.”3

Worth1000's claims notwithstanding, the preeminent site for hobbyist Photoshopping is Fark.com, a community discussion site founded in 1999 by Drew Curtis. Fark.com holds three to four Photoshop contests each day, each of which typically receives between 25 and 100 submissions. Each contest begins with the posting of a “seed” photo or theme to which contestants must respond. Contestants upload their entries to a dedicated discussion page, and site members can vote for one entry which they like the best. Contest pages are laid out in a “thread” format common to many web discussion forums, allowing entries and comments on them to be interspersed. After a few days of voting, a winner is declared, and the contest thread is made available in an “archived” format, with entries listed in descending order according to the number of votes they received.

Fark.com's demographics are heavily skewed toward young American males. Federated Media Publishing, which sells advertising space on Fark.com, reports that 78% of the Fark.com audience is between the ages of 18 and 39, and 80% of them are male.4 Thus it would be a mistake to generalize from an analysis of the content of Fark.com Photoshop contests to cultures or communities beyond young American males with ready access to the Internet. But the sheer number of contests which Fark.com hosts and the level of participation in these contests makes it an excellent site for examining the range of specific techniques used by photo manipulators.

Medhurst and DeSousa's taxonomy for organizing the visual techniques used by political cartoonists was developed from their content analysis of political cartoons that appeared on the pages of four newspapers during the 1980 U.S. Presidential campaign. They argue that these techniques can be understood as resources for the persuasive efforts of political cartoonists, which in turn can be categorized using the traditional principles of rhetoric. While they focus on political cartooning, I believe that their framework can, with a few minor modifications, be applied to “gag” cartooning in general. Gag cartoons are a larger genre to which political cartoons belong. They typically consist of a single image depicting some humorous scenario, which may or may not be accompanied by a text caption providing a punchline (Library of Congress 2006). As I will show, many of the images that appear in Fark.com Photoshop contests are firmly in the tradition of gag cartoons, despite the differences in the tools used to construct them.

Sampling method

The analysis presented here is based on my examination of the winning image from each of the 98 Photoshop contests held on Fark.com during the month of April 2007. I chose to look only at winning

2 http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_threads.php?forumid=27 3 http://www.worth1000.com/ 4 http://www.federatedmedia.net/authors/fark

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images, on the assumption that these images were the ones that had been most successful in communicating a message to their intended audience. Rather than looking at the images in their original context on Fark.com, I used the Fark Photoshop Scrutinizer,5 a third-party tool created by a site participant that allows easy browsing of all the Photoshop contests, sorted by contest or image author. The Scrutinizer provides links back to the original Fark.com pages, so in cases where I felt I need more context to interpret an image, I was able to easily locate the original discussion thread.

There are a variety of reasons to believe that this sample is not representative. Fark.com does not actually host the images entered in the contests, so contestants must rely on third-party hosting services such as Photobucket6 to make their images available. Since many of the these hosting services are intermittently unavailable, only host images for a limited time, or actively remove images which violate copyright (which nearly all the images entered in Photoshop contests do by definition), not every winning image was still accessible at the time I conducted my survey. Because of this, the actual set of winners analyzed consisted of only 92 images. The unavailability of images is likely to be correlated with other factors such as the technical sophistication of the image author, since technically sophisticated authors may have the resources or skills to make sure their images are hosted reliably.

Furthermore, the set of images probably also reflects seasonal variation (many American schools have their spring breaks during the month of April) or other exogenous influences. Thus I do not attempt to make any generalizations about relative proportions here. However, my cursory examination of the wider set of Photoshop contest images leads me to believe that while my sample is not representative enough to draw statistical conclusions, it is exhaustive in the sense that every technique employed by the Fark.com photo manipulators appears at least once, making it suitable for a qualitative analysis.

Classical rhetorical theory defines five “canons” or principles: invention, disposition, style, memory, and delivery. Invention is the selection or discovery of a topic. Disposition concerns the way conceptual elements are arranged to make a statement about the selected subject matter. Style refers to the selection or creation of the specific words or images used to communicate the arranged elements. While invention, disposition, and style are relatively straightforward concepts, memory and delivery are more difficult to grasp, particularly when they are applied to rhetorical forms other than speech. Here I will focus primarily on analyzing the Fark.com Photoshop contest images using the first three canons, and use memory and delivery as frames for some more speculative ideas.

Invention

Medhurst and DeSousa set forth four subject areas from which political cartoonists draw their topics: literary or cultural allusions, general social or political commentary, current events, and perceptions of the character of prominent individuals. With the exception of perceptions of character, all of these topic areas were well represented among the Fark.com Photoshop images I looked at.

Allusions to American pop culture were most common. Many of the characters and story elements drawn from movies and television shows such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Jaws are likely to be recognizable

5 http://www.mutantdog.com/fark/stats/ 6 http://photobucket.com/

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around the world. Other allusions reflect the narrow demographics of the Fark.com community. One image featured a caption taken from a screenshot of the original Legend of Zelda video game, which was very popular in the late 1980s. The text of the caption and the characteristic early Nintendo font in which it is presented are unlikely to be recognizable to anyone who wasn't a video game-playing child during the latter half of the 1980s, yet enough of the Fark.com audience was able to interpret it for it to win its contest.

Beyond popular movies, musical acts, television shows, and video games, images also drew from literature, famous paintings, and Broadway shows. Some images, instead of referring to specific stories or characters, counted upon viewers' ability to recognize more general cultural signs such as alien abductions, the canals of Venice, the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, 1950s U.S. household norms, and 1960s science-fiction visions of the future (see appendix, Image 1). A few images relied on viewers' recognition of cultural phenomena native to the Internet, ranging from “viral” images found everywhere on popular sites like MySpace and LiveJournal to inside jokes that only members or observers of the Fark.com community would recognize. The latter are often known among community members as “clichés,” and their use is regarded as an effective but not particularly respectable way to garner votes.

Social and political commentary on contemporary themes were also common. Subjects included the Bush administration, the nascent Democratic presidential campaigns, U.S. immigration issues, the Don Imus controversy, and religious persecution of homosexuals. The winner of a contest with the theme of “Photoshop an old advertisement for a product we used to think was good for us” was simply a photograph of a Bush/Cheney 2000 campaign sign (flanked by two popular Fark.com clichés for comic relief). A contest that asked entrants to “Convert an old Soviet propaganda poster or mural into a campaign ad for the 2008 U.S. elections” was won with an poster portraying a Soviet realist style portrait of Hillary Clinton and the words “VOTE HILLARY OBEY – DEMOCRATS OF THE UNITED STATES FOR A GLORIOUS FUTURE,” echoing the sentiments of an unauthorized but widely-viewed Barack Obama campaign ad that had appeared on YouTube the previous month (Healy 2007). Commentary was occasionally reflexive, focusing on the Fark.com community and the Photoshop contests in particular, as Image 2 illustrates.

Closely related to images that commented on contemporary issues were images that simply used current events as topical material, without making any clear commentary about them. In addition to a number of events related to the U.S. presidential campaign, the recent death of Anna Nicole Smith and the Easter holiday also provided fodder for the Fark Photoshoppers.

The lack of images focusing on the personal characteristics of public figures indicate that this inventional category is specific to cartoons. When portraying real individuals, cartoonists need to be able to make them immediately recognizable to a wide audience. Unless they are capable of drawing extremely realistic images, they must rely on their ability to make salient physical traits, such as Nixon's nose or Reagan's hair. This selection of one iconic attribute to represent the whole is what Jewitt and Oyama refer to as a symbolic structure, one of the types of syntactic patterns that generates the representational meaning of an image (Jewitt & Oyama 2001). For public figures who possess no obviously recognizable physical characteristics, cartoonists must invent new signs and use them constantly and consistently until

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their audience comes to identify them with those figures (Plumb 2004).7 Photoshoppers, who can use actual photographs of the figures whom they wish to depict, face no such dilemma and so have no need to focus on personal characteristics.

By focusing on political cartoons which appear on newspaper editorial pages, Medhurst and DeSousa miss a fifth inventional theme, which might be described as shock, titillation, or gross-out humor. Newspaper editors are usually careful to keep such themes out of their pages, but there is a long tradition of such themes in gag cartooning more generally. As one might expect, such themes are common in the Fark.com Photoshop contests as well, although surprisingly few of winning images I examined relied on them. In fact, overtly violent or pornographic imagery is frowned upon in the Fark forums, and images with such elements cannot be posted directly to Photoshop contests, but must be hidden behind a confirmation dialog. This suppression of images deemed “not safe for work” suggests that many of those viewing and participating in these contests may be doing so while at work or school.

Disposition

Disposition is the arrangement or organization of one's subject matter for maximum impact. Medhurst and DeSousa identify contrast as the major form of disposition used by political cartoonists. At Fark.com, too, contrast is the overwhelmingly dominant dispositional form. Image authors can create contrasts among any of the three types of messages identified by Barthes (Barthes 1977). Different shapes or visual forms can contrast with one another (contrast at the non-coded or literal iconic level), the meanings symbolized by these forms can contrast with one another (contrast at the coded iconic level), verbal elements can contrast with one another (contrast at the linguistic level), and text captions can contrast with visual forms or meanings (contrast between the linguistic and iconic messages). Nearly all of the images I analyzed used some form of contrast to good effect. In most cases the effect of this contrast was humorous, but occasionally it was used simply to create striking images, as in Image 3.

One common and effective form of contrast used by the Fark Photoshoppers is the substitution of elements in the original photograph with new elements carrying opposite connotations. Lake and Pickering identify such substitution as one of the techniques used for visual refutation in their analysis of documentary films on abortion (Lake & Pickering 1998). In the Fark.com contests, this technique is not used for refutation—the original images rarely make any identifiable arguments that could be refuted—but as a form of contrast that highlights and calls into question commonplace assumptions.

For example, the seed image for a contest entitled “Photoshop these industrious gentlemen” shows a black and white image of teenage boys in a wood shop class, a classic image of America manhood circa 1950. In the winning image (Image 4), all the elements connoting masculinity have been replaced with their coded opposites, while maintaining the general arrangement of the boys and their teacher and the period look of the image. The contrast calls attention to outmoded assumptions about gender roles, and one's reaction to seeing the teacher in a dress with his hair in a bun may call attention to assumptions that

7 Plumb gives the example of British political cartoonist Steve Bell, who, when faced with the bland appearance of Prime Minister John Major, decided to portray him wearing his underwear on the outside of his pants. Bell's audience came to associate this invented characteristic with Major, making him easy to depict. Garry Trudeau uses a similar technique in his Doonesbury comic strip, depicting George W. Bush as an asterisk inside a Roman military helmet which has become progressively more battered as his war has dragged on.

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still persist. The winner of another contest, which asked entrants to Photoshop an image of two hipster scientists holding a tentacled monstrosity, took a similar approach. In his winning image the scientists, still wearing lab coats, have been transformed into bug-faced monsters holding a human baby. The T-shirt of one of the scientists, originally depicting an alien face, has also been changed to depict the face of the Gerber baby.

Medhurst and DeSousa also identify two “minor” forms of disposition, which they call contradiction and commentary. Unlike contrast, which uses the juxtaposition of unlike things to call attention to some difference, contradiction uses such juxtapositions to condemn some person or idea. A common example is portrayals of hypocrisy, when a public figure is depicted as doing one thing while saying its opposite. I did not find any examples of contradiction in my sample. Though there were occasional images which might be construed as condemning their subjects, this condemnation was more likely to take the form of showing the subject in an absurd or unflattering situation, or as the object of physical violence. Neither did I find any instances of commentary, which Medhurst and DeSousa define as arrangements which simply confirm accepted truisms. Perhaps this reflects that simple affirmations of the status quo make for boring images, unlikely to win contests.

Style

In written and spoken discourse, style refers to the specific words chosen to communicate with an audience. Medhurst and DeSousa extend this definition to visual discourse by using it to refer to the specific graphic elements employed by an artist. For cartoonists, these include the use of line and form, the relative sizes of the figures depicted, the exaggeration of physical features, placement of figures within the panel (mise en scène), relations between text and imagery, and the overall composition of all these elements. A similar but expanded set of resources are available to photo manipulators.

Where cartoonists choose different kinds of pen strokes, shading, and cross-hatching to style their imagery, Photoshoppers can apply a wide range of filters to achieve similar kinds of effects. Filters are algorithms that run on bitmapped images, transforming the look and feel of the images without changing their literally denoted content (but often significantly changing their connotations). For example, a “soft glow” filter can be used to give an arbitrary photograph of a person romantic connotations. Filters are important tools for the Fark.com Photoshoppers. Sometimes they are necessary to make new elements blend seamlessly into the original image. In other cases they are critical for creating the intended meaning of the manipulated image, as in Image 1 where a “painting” filter has been applied to the original photograph to make it look like an architect's rendition of a building of the future.

Relative size and exaggeration are stylistic elements used by both cartoonists and Photoshoppers. A common strategy used in the Fark.com Photoshop contests is the recontextualization of figures from the original photograph by drastically changing the relative size of their surroundings. A good example of this is Image 5, in which a group of women learning to braze joints at a vocational school during World War II are transformed into eerie gods intervening in the fate of humanity. Exaggeration is really just the method of relative size applied to specific attributes of some figure rather than to different figures in a scene. While exaggeration is a cornerstone technique of caricature and cartooning, is is used less often by the Fark.com Photoshoppers, probably because it is technically difficult to shrink or enlarge specific

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features of a photographic figure while maintaining realism. When it is used it is usually paired with non-realistic imagery.

Placement in the frame is often utilized in a pragmatic manner by Photoshoppers. Because there are limits on the extent to which figures can be digitally manipulated and still look photo-realistic, clever Photoshoppers will often place objects in such a way as to block the viewer's gaze, forcing him to complete the image in his imagination. But occasionally placement in the frame will be used to more narrative ends, by creating a vector connecting figures within the frame (Jewitt & Oyama 2001). In Image 6, the narrative vector created between the starving African child in the lower left corner and the wine-drinking Objectivist in the lower right contributes to the scathing critique of Ayn Rand's philosophy.

Cartoonists use text captions as punchlines that simultaneously comment on, explain, and reveal hidden meanings of the visual image. While most cartoons rely on these captions to make their messages interpretable, reliance on captioning seems to be considered a negative quality among the Fark Photoshoppers, as such images rarely win contests. Occasionally captions will appear in the form of signs held by figures in the image. Often, as in Image 7, these signs are held by animals and rendered in shaky handwritten script with poor grammar or misspellings, presumably signifying the animal's poor mastery of English.

The other type of image in which text appears is the parody image, where textual elements are usually necessary to make recognizable the genre that is being parodied. Parodies of print advertising, movie posters, and news articles are all quite common in the Fark.com Photoshop contests. Parody images rely on what Medhurst and DeSousa call montage, the overall interaction of graphic elements that contribute to the image's meaning. It is the compositional meaning generated by the combination of meaningful elements within the image that create recognizable genres (Jewitt & Oyama 2001). For an image such as Image 8 to be recognizable as an advertisement, it must use the kinds of fonts, layout, and text copy which we have come to associate with advertisements.

Finally, the Fark.com Photoshoppers have one additional stylistic resource available to them that was not available to the newspaper cartoonists studied by Medhurst and DeSousa: animation. Though still images dominate the Fark.com Photoshop contests, the fact that the images are shared over the web means that contestants are free to make judicious use of animation in their creations via animated image files. Animated image files actually contain a set of still images which are loaded in rapid, cyclical succession by the viewer's web browser. Though not suitable for full videos, animated image files can be used to make figures in an image shake, slide, bounce, rattle or roll.

Memory

The rhetorical canon of memory is typically associated with the memorization of speeches. As rhetorical theory moved beyond oratory to include written discourse, the canon of memory was often ignored or forgotten (Reynolds 1993). Medhurst and DeSousa use the canon of memory to classify cartoonists' use of “visual mnemonics,” images intended as shorthand for or reminders of incidents from the past. They give the example of Patrick Oliphant, who during the 1980 Presidential campaign consistently depicted Ted Kennedy accompanied by a fish. The fish was not intended to help readers identify Kennedy, but

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instead was meant to remind them of his role in a 1969 incident in which he drove a car into a pond, killing his young female passenger. Though functionally similar to the mnemonic devices such as “memory palaces” used by orators, these visual mnemonics are used to help evoke images in the mind of the audience, rather than helping produce words in the mind of the speaker.

Reynolds argues for an expanded notion of the canon of memory suitable for application to written composition. In addition to the mnemonic interpretation discussed above, he proposes memorability (the use of memorable details and phrases), database (the organization of a text so as to ease the retrieval of information from it), and the unconscious (associations and connotations made below the level of conscious awareness) as alternative interpretations of the canon of memory (Reynolds 1993). He also notes (as do Medhurst and DeSousa) the relationship between memory and invention, particularly the way memory enables the use of literary and cultural allusion as sources of invention.

Among the Fark.com Photoshoppers, memory is a resource that can be used to show one's solidarity with the community. Many of the winning images I looked at referred to or incorporated images from past contests; one cleverly combined the original images from at least nine previous contests. When images are used repeatedly in this manner by a number of different contestants over time, they become known as “clichés” and are alternately denounced and promoted by the community. On the one hand, the use of these familiar images is viewed as lazy, a sign of the author's inability to come up with an original idea. On the other hand, these clichés constitute a visual history of the Fark.com Photoshop contests, and their power to evoke community bonds and reminiscences of past contests means that contestants who use them cleverly stand a strong chance of winning. The existence of web sites which endeavor to collect and explain these clichéd images are a testament to their power, and an illustration of the role played by memory and recollection in the Fark.com Photoshop contests.

Delivery

Delivery is the rhetorical canon concerned with the manner in which a rhetorical production is presented to an audience. Classical rhetoric analyzed delivery in terms of voice (the speaker's volume, pitch, tone, and rate of speaking) and gesture (the use of body movements to punctuate the speaker's points). Medhurst and DeSousa suggest that the visual equivalent of voice is to be found in the principles of visual design, which govern where and how on the newspaper page a political cartoon is presented. In other words, voice concerns the external spatial relations of cartoon, as distinguished from the internal spatial relations used as stylistic resources. Gesture is used as metaphor for intertextuality. Medhurst and DeSousa give the example of an editorial cartoon that refers to the textual editorials that appear beside it, illustrating or challenging their points.

External spatial relations do not play any role in the Fark.com Photoshop contests. The threaded layout of the discussion forums is not under the control of the contestants, and thus cannot be used to influence the manner of delivery. Every image submitted to a contest, with the exception of “not safe for work” images, is presented in an identical manner. Gesture, on the other hand, plays a key role in every Photoshop contest, in that contestants must choose how they will refer to the contest theme or seed image. One form of gesturing toward the original image is substitution, which I have discussed above as a form of contrast. Another popular form is inversion of perspective. In images which use this technique,

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the viewer is placed in the position of one of the figures from the original image, seeing the world through that figure's eyes. Image 7 illustrates how this technique manipulates the relations between the viewer and the world inside picture, sources of interactive meaning (Jewitt & Oyama 2001).

Visual rhymes or puns are another kind of gesture made to the original images. Many winning images simply replace elements of the original photograph with new elements that have the same shape and color, but totally different denotations. Unlike substitutions, these visual puns do not involve any contrasts between coded iconic meanings. They simply comment on the fact that one thing resembles another. Often these resemblances are just one element among a complex of meanings found in an image, as in Image 6, where the resemblance between the metal sculpture of the original photograph and the statue of Atlas at Rockefeller Center provides the link that situates the scene in post-apocalyptic New York City, and underlies the logic of the juxtaposition of the sculpture with the image of Atlas from the cover of Rand's book.

In addition to these visual gestures, the Fark.com Photoshoppers also occasionally use verbal gestures to refer to the seed image or contest theme. For example, the meaning of Image 9 relies on the audience's knowledge of the commonly used phrase “dumber than a fence post” and the fact that the seed image was referred to as a “fence post” in the contest description. It is these verbal elements, and not any connotations of the visual image of the fence post, that allow the manipulated image to be interpreted. Had the the original image been described as a “support beam,” this interpretation may not have been possible. These verbal correspondences can involve wordplay as well. One contest in which the theme was simply the phrase “A sock, a rock, and a block” (with no seed image) was won by a clever contestant who arranged a sequence of three images depicting a burlap bag, female cleavage, and Sammy Davis, Jr.8

Something new?

So far, I have shown how the images produced in the Fark.com Photoshop contests can be viewed as continuous with a tradition of single-panel gag cartooning that began long before the advent of digital technology. The classical canons of rhetoric, used by Medhurst and DeSousa to classify and analyze the visual statements of political cartoonists, can also be used to classify and organize the visual statements of digital photo manipulators. Moreover, many of the specific techniques used by the latter are similar to or the same as those used by the former.

However, the Fark.com Photoshop contests include one more category of images that I have left out of this account, a category that is not adequately accounted for by Medhurst and DeSousa's framework and which does not have any clear counterparts in pre-digital visual culture. The images in this category are often described as “surreal” by the Fark.com community. Unlike the images discussed above, these images do not denote any known figures or objects in the real world or the worlds of fiction. The subject matter is purely fantastic and weird imagery. While these images sometimes involve contrasting arrangements, the contrasts do not function to call attention to any differences, but just accentuate the hallucinatory quality of the images. Finally, the stylistic techniques used to create these surreal visions were not available to newspaper cartoonists or anyone using analog media.

8 A sack, a rack, and a black.

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Surrealist images were quite common the sample of winners I examined, probably because these images require a high level of technical skill to create. Unlike the winners from the other categories, which rely on a mix of clever rhetoric and Photoshop skills to win over their audiences, the surrealist images are pure displays of Photoshop virtuosity. Image 10 demonstrates a common approach, in which the lines and shapes of the original image are fluidly manipulated into new forms. Here the original image functions solely as raw material—there is no gesture toward either its literal or coded meanings in the final image, though a residue of its futuristic connotations remains.

This capacity to use existing photographs as a fluid medium—not as fragments or layers, but as something akin to paint—is something truly “new” offered by digital photo manipulation. While it is possible to imagine an incredibly skilled oil painter creating something like Image 11, I doubt that the effect would be the same. Digital technology is what allowed the creator of this image to “paint” the image of a horse using the textures of a cuttlefish. This capacity to “dip one's brush into the world,” using any captured images, colors, and textures as substances for drawing or painting with, has been recognized elsewhere as a defining quality of new media (Ryokai 2004).

So is digital photo manipulation as an online social activity, this seemingly paradigmatic new media practice, really “new”? As usual, the answer is more complex than a simple “yes” or “no.” Much of the visual discourse evident in the Fark.com Photoshop contests is part of a tradition that dates back centuries. The anomalous juxtapositions and revelatory punchlines seen every day on Fark.com have their counterparts in the techniques and strategies employed by satirical illustrators in the American colonies. Even the use of a shared archive of reusable imagery, something often believed to be an exclusive property of the digital domain, has its counterpart in the libraries of stock images drawn upon by printers of the 18th century (Lordan 2005). But the digital medium also offers the potential for new kinds of creative strategies, a potential that the Fark.com Photoshoppers and their ilk are just beginning to explore. As Photoshopper Roger Mexico put it, “ There is some major talent here at FARK PS, and I mean all kinds—the techos, the surrealists, the goofies, the rugbyjocks, the cliché-ers—but wouldn't it be great if there were ways that the boundaries could be pushed, further?”9

9 Posted to the Fark.com forums, April 23, 2007 (http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=2753403).

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References

Barthes, R. 1977. Rhetoric of the image. In Image, Music, Text, 32-51. New York: Hill and Wang.

Healy, P. 2007. Blog Exposes Creator of Ad Portraying Clinton as Big Brother. The New York Times, March 22. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/us/politics/22hillary.html (accessed May 7, 2007).

Jewitt, C., and R. Oyama. 2001. Visual meaning: A social semiotic approach. In Handbook of Visual Analysis, ed. T. van Leeuwen and C. Jewitt, 134-156. London: Sage.

Lake, R.A., and B.A. Pickering. 1998. Argumentation, the Visual, and the Possibility of Refutation: An Exploration. Argumentation 12, no. 1: 79-93.

Library of Congress. 2006. Punch Lines: Gag and Single Panel Cartoons. From Cartoon America: A Library of Congress Exhibition. http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/cartoonamerica/cartoon-punch.html (accessed May 6, 2007).

Lister, M. 1995. Introductory essay. In The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, ed. Martin Lister, 1-26. London: Routledge.

Lister, M., J. Dovey, S. Giddings, I. Grant, and K. Kelly. 2003. Digitality. In New media: a critical introduction, 13-19. London: Routledge.

Lordan, E. J. 2005. Politics, Ink: How Cartoonists Skewer America's Politicians, from King George III to George Dubya. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

Manovich, L. 2001. What is new media? In The Language of New Media, chapter 1. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Manovich, L. 2007. What comes after remix? http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/remix_2007_2.doc.

Medhurst, M.J., and M.A. DeSousa. 1981. Political cartoons as rhetorical form: A taxonomy of graphic discourse. Communication Monographs 48, no. 3: 197-236.

Reynolds, J. F. 1993. Memory Issues in Composition Studies. In Rhetorical Memory and Delivery, ed. J. F. Reynolds, 1-16. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Ryokai, K., S. Marti, and H. Ishii. 2004. I/O brush: drawing with everyday objects as ink. Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '04): 303-310.

Sontag, S. 1977. In Plato's Cave. In On Photography, 3-26. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Sutherland, I. E. 1964. Sketch pad: a man-machine graphical communication system. Proceedings of the SHARE design automation workshop: 6.329-6.346.

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Image 1: Winner of the “Photoshop Barcelona's Olympic Park” contest(posted April 1st, 2007 by Yammering_Splat_Vector)

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Seed image.

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Image 2: Winner of the “Photoshop Farker Soundcow's bassist” contest (posted April 19th, 2007 by OurManFlint1)

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Ryan Shaw May 8th, 2007

Image 3: Winner of the “Photoshop this creepy hallway” contest(posted April 24, 2007 by Alessandra)

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Ryan Shaw May 8th, 2007

Image 4: Winner of the “Photoshop these industrious gentlemen” contest (posted April 24, 2007 by leftymcrighty)

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Ryan Shaw May 8th, 2007

Image 5: Winner of the “Photoshop these brazin' hussies” contest(posted April 29, 2007 by Dark Johnson)

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Ryan Shaw May 8th, 2007

Image 6: Winner of the “Photoshop these Atlases” contest (posted April 24th, 2007 by HansensDisease)

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Ryan Shaw May 8th, 2007

Image 7: Winner of the “Photoshop this close-up” contest (posted April 18, 2007 by Andy Iceprey)

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Ryan Shaw May 8th, 2007

Image 8: Winner of the “Photoshop this Battlestar Galactica scene” contest (posted April 18, 2007 by DarkJohnson)

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Ryan Shaw May 8th, 2007

Image 9: Winner of the “Photoshop this fence post” contest(posted March 27, 2007 by FoxTick)

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Ryan Shaw May 8th, 2007

Image 10: Winner of the “Photoshop this MAC250 wash light” contest (posted April 22, 2007 by PirateKing)

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Ryan Shaw May 8th, 2007

Image 11: Winner of the “Photoshop this cuttlefish” contest (posted April 8, 2007 by trumpai)

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