I’m not expecting any design-crit mag or site to delve into the Cash Money aesthetic and tell us its history, and who are its Peter Savilles and Stephan Sagmiesters — or even its David Carson. (Although I would sure read it, and I wish such pubs would assign articles like that.) But couldn’t one make the case that this isn’t an aesthetic mess at all, but rather a coherent visual language?
To say the preoccupation with old engravings and printer’s fragments pre-dates psychedelic, punk, and grunge is a cliché.
* * * Charles Johnson’s term “fauxtography,” of course, suggests that there is something “true” about photography, at least photography that isn’t posed or Photoshopped. And in recent years, the mainstream press has embraced this orthodox view. The principle is straightforward. Zero tolerance. Allow no digital manipulation. No posing. If a photographer uses any one of a variety of Photoshop tools, fire him. It’s not that I disagree with these rules. I don’t, but the development of Photoshop (1) can heighten our awareness of how a photograph can be manipulated, and (2) may inure us to all the other ways in which an image’s relationship to truth can be compromised. It allows the false assumption: if we can just determine that this photograph wasn’t Photoshopped, then it must be “true.”[14] But Photoshop serves as a reminder to us of something that we should have known all along: photographs can deceive.The presumption behind a photograph
Change the yellow labels, change the caption and you change the meaning of the photographs. You don’t need Photoshop. That’s the disturbing part. Captions do the heavy lifting as far as deception is concerned. The pictures merely provide the window-dressing. The unending series of errors engendered by falsely captioned photographs are rarely remarked on.
I would go further and say that no-one should ever use email to try to resolve an upset, communicate disapproval, give feedback and express anything other than the most positive feelings. These should be reversed exclusively for phone or face to face conversations. Yet… people still try, making a mess of it. To overcome the unique combination of intimacy and distance takes superb writing skills that are only possessed by a handful… and of that number, few have the time one hand that is required to write great emails.
In my opinion, it’s much cooler to have it out there on the web. The book is just boxed away somewhere, but in electronic form it is out there for anybody to read. Slightly scary, very exhilarating. That’s the way things should be, and are.
