Photography has traditionally been considered a factual visual record of events, capturing a moment in time. Photographers have employed this “frozen moment” concept to produce extremely profound and moving images. However, the advent of the digital camera has changed the practice of photography forever and completely.
Adobe’s tag line for their application Photoshop is, “If you can dream it, you can do it.” It pretty much sums up how much one can manipulate photographic images in Photoshop. From early on I embraced this new photographic technology and now produce all of my work exclusively using digital input and output.
Over the years there have been several different themes that predominated the work for a time. Exploring the abilities and limitations of the hardware and software led to conceptually different image results. I started by carefully retouching a photograph so it appeared to be real but was in actuality fabricated. Later came the addition of various graphic elements to the compositions. Some of the woks became large “collages” made up of numerous individual elements. Recently I concentrated for a period on producing only black and white images of single frames.
Currently I am exploring the use multiple images in a simple collage to create compositions.
David Keister
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