by Laxman Gani
If there’s a second revolution that has followed hot on the heels of the
personal computer, it is the ability to digitize (translate into binary digits)
sounds and images. Already it has revolutionized the publishing, audio
recording, and broadcasting industries. Now, it’s transforming the world of the
fine arts. An accomplished Mexican photographer with work in the permanent collections of
major international museums, Pedro Meyer’s first venture into CD-ROM publishing
was with his 1992 title I Photograph to Remember, a collection of stills
of his parents in their last years of life. “I never took those images for any
such purpose,” says Meyer, “I printed them only for myself.” After the photos
had a successful showing in New York, Meyer was convinced by Voyager publisher
Bob Stein to release the collection on CD-ROM. It has become a best seller and
is now widely regarded as one of the first “classics” in this nascent medium.
This first CD-ROM f�ted the notion that traditional, unaltered
photographs could successfully be distributed via a digital medium. His latest
work blows the door into the digital domain wide open. While I Photograph to
Remember caused some to speculate whether it was appropriate for a
photographer to capture images of a private family’s pain, his latest CD-ROM is
controversial almost by design.
At home in both Mexico City and Los Angeles, Pedro Meyer’s newest work,
Truths and Fictions, is an examination of the mythical and popular
traditions in the cultures of both Mexico and the United States. But these
works have a bite that goes beyond traditional photography: Saints stroll
tirelessly through thin air and elderly women become pint-sized witches.
Popular icons such as billboards become dislocated within fields of migrant
workers. Indeed, most of the images on the disc would be impossible if not for
Meyer’s clever manipulation of photographic truth — manipulation he has
performed within the realm of the computer. His unabashed altering of
photographic-quality images juxtaposes different geographies, times, and
cultures — and is raising more than a few eyebrows.
Clearly, this is no mere experiment for Meyer, who began dabbling in digital
imaging over 11 years ago. Today, his wife will take his undeveloped rolls of
film to the market, drop them off, then pick them up when she’s done shopping.
Though it seems surprising that a professional photographer would trust a
supermarket developer to print his work, to Meyer it’s just a small part of the
process — he hasn’t kept a darkroom for over six years now. By digitizing the
negatives or slides, he can use his computer to adjust and compensate for any
possible problems in developing. “I haven’t had a single image from the
supermarket which wasn’t usable,” he says. “I shoot everything in color, then I
decide if I want the image to be in black and white or color — I can go in any
direction I please. I have absolutely no need to ever go into the darkroom
again.”
Meyer plies his trade largely from his desktop. Aside from his standard 35mm
camera, his tools include a powerful Apple Macintosh system equipped with color
scanner, imaging software such as Adobe Photoshop and Fractal Design’s
Painter, and a laser printer. Similar setups are now common on the desks of
many artists, art directors, and graphic designers. This is cause for concern
on the bit-frontier: While altering photographic reality is a time-honored art,
the ease with which such alterations can be made is considerably enhanced with
these new desktop tools. Consider the subtle, unannounced alterations of truth
which have appeared on mass-market publications such as National
Geographic (shifting the position of a Great Pyramid to fit onto a cover),
Time magazine (darkening the skin tones in O.J. Simpson’s mug shot), and
the not-so-delicate satirical covers of Spy.
Clearly the ethics of digital manipulation is a prescient issue for a news
photojournalist, but how do they affect the photographer-as-artist? This is the
central question behind Truths and Fictions.
“There’s a common misunderstanding about the word `manipulation,'” Meyer says,
leading us into the debate. “Photography, when you think about it, is manipulation. The moment you decide what film you’re going to use — the world
isn’t exactly black-and-white — or choose a wide-angle or a telephoto lens, or
throw one part of the frame out of focus… All these steps are manipulations.
What you do in the darkroom is also a set of controls: the chemical elements of
the process. It isn’t like, `Now we have manipulation, before we did
not.'”
Pedro Meyer’s creations are always skillful. He explains the
difficulties of adjusting lighting, shadows, and perspective to maintain an
atmosphere — even if a fantastic one. Describing his role, he likens it to
that of a stage director rather than a painter. In many of his images, he’s
carefully chosen the players and assigns meaningful roles to them by
transforming and positioning them onto his digital stage. The results range
from the jarringly abstract to the deceptively lifelike.
In “The Arrival of White Man,” for instance, Meyer has combined images of a
dry landscape in southern Oaxaca, Mexico, with a weathered old woman, then
tinted the sky dark green to give her the appearance of the figure of Mother
Earth. Next, he expands upon his own appearance as “the white man” taking the
woman’s photograph, and positions a white saint idol into the background —
thereby constructing a visual metaphor for the destructive changes modern
civilizations have brought upon native lands.
Other manipulations are more subtle. In “Scarves in the Market,” he combines
three images at a bazaar — brightly colored fabric wares, a deep blue sky, and
a man wearing a colored scarf — to overcome the limitations of his film, which
could not have captured the textures of all three because of their different
exposure requirements. In this case, his computer helps him pull together
objects that are already present in reality, but could not be captured together
in a single shot. In so doing, he creates a “manipulation” that is perhaps a
truer representation of the event than would be possible with film alone.
Beyond the artistic liberties offered by an electronic palette, having his
images pressed onto CD-ROM has brought Meyer a large worldwide audience. It has
simply made it easier for him to distribute his photographs, both alongside his
gallery shows and as separate items for purchase. “I would venture to say at
least half a million people have seen my work,” he notes, “if not more.”
Meyer also points out that the notion of an audiovisual presentation of
photographic work is nothing new. (Before it became a newmedia buzzword,
“multimedia” used to refer to presentations of multiple slide projectors
synchronized with audiotape soundtracks.) What’s changed is that the ascension
of CD-ROM discs as a low-cost medium has multiplied the audience for artwork
that engages the visual and aural senses.
If his digital images are often complex and painstakingly constructed, Pedro
Meyer’s annotations are disarmingly simple. His voice is gentle and his words,
while well-considered, are casual. The minimalist narrative for I Photograph
to Remember was recorded with a rudimentary microphone in his living room.
Amazingly, this demo was recorded in a single take, and eventually became the
final narrative track for the disc. Combined with tastefully sparse music
accompaniment, his CD-ROMs evoke a mood that goes beyond a quiet gallery
showing, yet keep the focus where it should be: on the photographic images
themselves.
This absolute attitude towards CD-ROM production flies in the face of most
titles being marketed today. Many are over-glitzed, interactive cacophonies of
light and sound. Regardless of content, a common expectation is that CD-ROMs
need be flashy affairs of elaborate content hierarchies and a plethora of
(often unnecessary) “hot” buttons. Meyer compares this period of CD-ROM
development to when the music industry introduced stereo recording. Then, sound
engineers often abused the ability to split sounds into left- and
right-channels, producing many recordings that sound amateurish today. “A lot
of the discs that are coming out are just about showing off the possibilities
of the equipment,” he says. “There’s no content in them.”
While Meyer embraces his new digital toolbox, he realizes that not everyone is
ready to infuse photorealism with the ideologies of Picasso or
M�li�s. With this in mind, he has solicited and published the
letters and opinions of over 100 artists worldwide along with his works in
Truths and Fictions. After all, this is the debate in which we are being
invited — if not forced — to participate.
Above all else, Pedro Meyer suggests that his digital works should heighten
our awareness of the photographer as someone who is always trying to create an
image, not merely record one; of the photographer as an author. Though the
tools may have changed, he says, “It’s not any different than it’s always
been.”
This article appears in November 24 • 1995 and November 24 • 1995 (Cover).