Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film - by Britt Salvesen & Staci Steinberger (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

An essential primer on the history of Photoshop and other tools of digital image manipulation, from the 1970s through to the current day

Published with Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This timely volume, Digital Witness, examines the impact of Photoshop and other tools of digital manipulation, tracing simultaneous developments in photography, graphic design and visual effects over roughly five decades.
Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, advances in computer science and engineering made it possible to design, build and run raster graphics programs, while developments in graphical user interfaces allowed artists and designers to directly create and edit images. At the same time, these nascent technologies led to concerns about authorship, automation and the viability of the businesses that supported various creative industries. During the 1990s, following the release of Photoshop, image-editing software rose to widespread use in multiple fields. As digitally altered imagery has permeated popular culture, aesthetic and ethical debates have played out in mass media, politics, advertising and even the judicial system.
Examining the relationship between software development and artistic practice, Digital Witness explores how artists and engineers responded to each others' innovations. Each new version of Photoshop allowed for increasingly sophisticated edits, from tracing intricate paths to layers to editable type. Some artists found creative potential in these advances, taking analog art forms such as collage to digitally enabled extremes. Others resisted the growing dependence on mainstream commercial software, developing open-source alternatives.
Published in conjunction with the landmark PST ART exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this substantial, image-packed volume includes Q&As with noted visual artists, filmmakers and designers such as Copper Frances Giloth, Raqi Syed and April Greiman.

Review Quotes

'Digital Witness' is relevant because it goes deep. Including nearly 200 artists, designers and makers, it tracks from the 1980s to the present day to give a history of our tools. At the same time, it avoids well-worn images and examples (such as the cover of 'Time' magazine in 1982, in which digital imaging tools 'moved' a pyramid). Instead it presents a fresh take on the debates.--Diana Smyth "British Journal of Photography"

[Whether] it's the aesthetic of early-1990s rave and warehouse party culture or mid/late-90s hip hop, the look of 'the digital' is instantly legible, proving how far and wide these innovations have travelled.--Cat Kron "ArtReview"