He tried to explain to me, through the painful haze of my hangover, how he manages to create pictures that look so real but aren’t.
“We have to define ‘reality’ if we’re going to get anywhere, Terry. The reality of the image is what you see. It doesn’t exist until the artist creates it. To say it isn’t real misses a large part of the whole point. For instance, how can you say that this image isn’t a reality?”
I looked at the picture on the wall in front of us. We were standing in the main room of his little gallery. The art was done by a New York compatriot of Darien’s, and it depicted a huge can of tuna fish, upright on its side in the middle of an expansive American prairie. Two photographically “real” people stood in the foreground and looked upward at the can. The photographically “real” tuna fish can was about sixty feet tall.
“But that scene never took place,” I said. “It might be a real image, but it’s based on a false event.”
“No, not really, Terry. It’s not based on an event at all. The event is the image. The event doesn’t take place until the artist brings it into being.”
“But there’s no reality there.”
“Literal visual truth — as you’re referring to it — died decades ago. We photographers killed it. Even National Geographic was reworking its photographs for the magazine, I mean taking some pretty big liberties by the standards of journalism. Look at any supermarket tabloid. You can see the splices quite easily. But on a work like this, you can’t. It’s a matter of degree.”
“How did he do it?”
Darien explained the process: a combination of digital imaging and an Iris printer, which uses continual ink-jet technology to apply colored ink to paper or canvas; photographs altered with painted passages, combined with monoprints of video footage of computer-generated images; enlarged Polaroid prints; and images drawn from a digital file. You just scan in an image, he said, then go to work on it with the Adobe Photoshop program on your computer and hurl 129 megabytes of power at it.
“I’ve been working on some traditional, labor-intensive processes too,” he said. “That involves producing photographic prints using pigment transfer and platinum printing. The pigment transfer is suspending the pigment in gelatin or gum Arabic, then building up layers of the color. The interesting thing about the older process is that the color will be stable on the paper for five hundred years. It’s time consuming and expensive.”
I nodded. The price tag for the giant tuna can was $1,400.
“Is it one of a kind?”
“It is now, but we can pull prints. It’s up to the artist, how many copies he wants out there.”
I thought. “What about... what if... what if the artist had certain images to begin with? Say, photographs. Pictures of a background, and pictures of a subject. Could he manipulate those to create an image that looked like this certain person was doing something in this certain place?”
Darien smiled and glanced at the work on the wall. “The guy on the left there, that’s me. And I guarantee you I never stood on a Nebraska prairie and stared up at a monster can of tuna fish.”
“Then it’s easy.”
“No. It’s complicated. There are new tools now. That’s what all this technology is — it’s just tools. They’re powerful tools and you have to know how to use them. They’re expensive. No, it’s not easy, but a lot of things are possible now that used to be impossible. Most of these artists might tell you that making it look easy is part of the art. Others, well, they like to let the technology show. Two different aesthetics, really.”
“If I showed that tuna fish picture to an expert in photography at the FBI, would he be able to tell it’s fake?”
“Wouldn’t take the FBI to see that it’s fake, Terry! In the way you mean ‘fake,’ that is.”
“Okay. Say it was just a can of tuna fish on a table. And the tools behind the image were digital processing and the Iris printer. Then, could that expert tell by examining the picture that it was done without a real can of tuna fish?”
“It was done with a real can of tuna fish. The real can of tuna fish was reproduced and stored by the digital file. It’s as ‘real’ a can of tuna fish in the file as it is in a picture. You know?”
“But a photograph is supposed to capture an image.”
“Wrong. A photograph creates an image. That’s the difference now. That’s where it’s all changing. Madison Avenue has been working on it for decades. But right now, the explosion in tools has made things possible that weren’t possible just three years ago. Three years from now... who knows?”
We toured the gallery and looked at other works.
Some were obviously “created” — like the tuna can; others — like a portrait of a woman with her cat — were absolutely convincing as plain old photographs.
“Why’s that one so special?” I asked. “There’s millions of cats like that.”
“The cat’s real. The woman doesn’t exist. She was created on a computer.”
I stepped up close to look at the lines on her face, the singular expression in her eyes, the details of her hands. You could see the wrinkles in her skin, the underlying veins, the blemishes and hairs.
“You can make anything,” I said.
“Almost.”
“What can’t you make?”
Darien crossed his arms and raised a hand to his face. He set his chin into the little cradle of thumb and curled forefinger. “I’m not sure. But why don’t you tell me what you want. And I’ll tell you if it’s makeable.”
“All right. I want five-by-seven photographs of a woman bathing her son. I want the woman to be a real woman, and I’ve got photographs of her face you can work with. The boy is real, and I can give you pictures of his face, also. But he’s never actually been bathed by this woman. They’ve never actually seen each other. And I want the bathroom to be a certain bathroom, and I’ve got pictures of that to give you, too. And when you’ve created an image of this woman bathing a kid she’s never seen in a genuine bathtub, I’m going to send the thing off to the FBI’s best scientists and I don’t want them to be able to say it was staged, retouched, enhanced, created, digitally manufactured or Iris ink-jet printed. I want them to say, yeah, that’s a picture of a woman giving a boy a bath. It’s real. It’s genuine. It happened. It’s evidence.”
“Color or black and white?”
“Color.”
“What’s your budget?”
“Whatever it takes.”
“Consider it done. There will be some limitations on it. If the image required visual information that wasn’t in the photographs you supplied, it would have to be generated by computer, by an artist who could extrapolate, who could imagine what was missing. Say he needed the inside of her left hand, but you didn’t have it on film. He’d have to create it.”
“Then the FBI guys would see a fake hand?”