The Painted Word by Bil Jones page 1

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	The Painted Photograph by Bill Jones The following essay was published (with illustrations) in a catalogue titled Digital Collaborations for Real Projects, Strattfordshire University, Stoke, UK. The series of works were curated by Eric Great-Rex and exhibited at the Real Gallery in NYC from Dec 6, 1997 to Feb 22, 1998. All of the works were produced in collaboration between the artists and Jon Cone at Cone Editions Press.
	The digitizing of continuous-tone photographic images completes the century-old quest to remove the hand from the art-making process. But, in a sweetly ironic sense, all photographic images produced in the digital age are once again manipulated. Essential electronic imaging processes such as Photoshop not only stand in place of the artist's hand, but have been developed directly out of a tradition of manipulated photography which reaches back to the mid-19th century and the inception of the medium. It is this conundrum, this strange cyclical riddle, that I wish to explore by discussing the work of five artists, all of whom employ digital means in producing images, but either short-circuit the output's uniformity of surface by the interjection of the hand, or knowingly mimic handiwork in a trompe l'oeil fashion which itself challenges the digital processes and in turn reveals their emerging syntax. The artists, David Humphrey, Cathy Cone, Yasumasa Morimura, Mark Hampson, and Eric Great-Rex, all confront the photographic syntax through the digital medium. In so doing they carry on a tradition that, while deeply effected by the introduction of digital media, has existed for nearly 160 years.
	In the latter half of the 19th century, not long after the invention of photography, artists such as O.J. Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson developed complicated montage methods for creating realistic scenes that mimicked painterly styles and engaged painterly subjects. Other photographer/artists of the Victorian era posed their friends and families in dramatic scenes much the way Jeff Wall, Tina Barney, and numerous others have done for the past few decades. The particularity of Rejlander's and Robin-son's work was that they literally manipulated the images in the dark room. Robinson devised a complex printing and masking technique to combine various images shot just for that purpose, a combination of old and new not unlike the print works of Yasumasa Morimura in the exhibition at hand. Rejlander's and Robinson's photographic manipulations were obviously a holdover from the centuries of painting and drawing when the hand was the only method for image making, but at the same time as innovators they pointed toward a confrontation with the mechanical nature of the photographic process which continues to the present. As the 20th century came into full swing, a unique photographic syntax developed based on the perceived objective qualities of the camera's mechanical work. Photographs thus became visual evidence; the documentation of an age of speed and mediation. The fiction that the camera made the images rather than its operator became the dominant photographic aesthetic of the twentieth century. Interestingly, the aesthetic of photographic objectivity coexisted with its own critique in the form of Dadaist and Constructivist photomontage, which point-ed out the jarring discontinuity of the photographic world-view by juxtaposing images which pointed out its discontinuity. Artists such as Man Ray and Christian Schad developed the photogram by directly affecting the photosensitive surface of the printing paper.
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