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Chris Kitze
“My work is solitary, yet created in public places, where it bears witness to a global transformation.”
Kitze’s lifelong romance with the photographic arts began when he took an Instamatic photo of Apollo 13 on its launch pad. Trained in commercial design studios and photographic labs, the artist worked in advertising, product and technical photography, as well as traditional landscape fine art photography before recognizing the emerging possibilities in software and digital media.
In his work, Kitze explores the intersection of technology, media and popular culture. The photographs in The Electric Image series have the appearance of digital compositing,
but with the exception of modest digital retouching, each image is photographed as it was found in a public place. The viewer is challenged to decode the multiple, overlapping messages and meanings in each image, as well as, the new context of the media and environment
where the image is viewed.
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The Electric Image
At the turn of the twenty-first century, digital technology made possible the ubiquity of large scale photo-realistic advertising images. Strategically and visibly placed in centers of capitalism, these store displays, lighted signs, giant video screens and billboards pander to the aspirations of passersby, targeting their desire for sex, food, power, addictive consumables, or something free.
In the twentieth century, photographs of objects also became objects of desire -- the desire of the merchant to transact and the viewer to consume. Because these objects are now monumental in scale and surrounded by giant lighted signs, they have changed the viewer's relationship with the object and the object's relationship to its surroundings.
It is this object - the subject of the original photograph, as well as, the original photograph on display that become altered by a change in size, context and by reflections of other messages superimposed on them. The act of making a photograph of this new, altered object creates yet another copy with a new context. This recursively questions the original object's uniqueness, authenticity and meaning.
Found at eye level in public places, many images are behind glass or plastic, providing a barrier that allows the viewer to see, but never to reach the object of their aspirations. The barrier is optically imperfect, delivering bits of one merchant's message transparently, while reflectively delivering bits of other messages creating an entirely improvisational mise-en-scène, recontextualizing the messages and the environment. When presented on a backlit medium like a computer screen or transparency, a new spectacle is created by transmitted light that draws in the viewer like a moth to a flame.
Because of the acceptance of digital photography in media, viewers are aware of the digital distortion used to create fiction in advertising imagery. Digital manipulation has made impossible-images that viewers accept as "real". However impossible or real the image, it acquires another kind of visual distortion when placed on the street and viewed at oblique angles through warped glass or plastic. Like a kind of digital noise, pedestrians, vehicles and signs pulse with motion in these reflections, adding to the distortion.
The intention of the advertising image is to increase awareness in the product being marketed and to plant the seeds of desire. Because of the ubiquity of advertising imagery, the eye is first overwhelmed with multitudes of visual icons and desensitized. The viewer then becomes cognizant of the change in context created by the surrounding imagery and attendant digital media overload. Finally, there is an enhanced semiotic awareness and a change in perception of their meanings that often differ from the advertiser's original intentions.
Commercial photography is often digitally enhanced to the point of illustration, eradicating any distinction between mediums. These photographs have the appearance of digital compositing, but with the exception of modest digital retouching, each image is as it was found in a public place. The viewer is challenged to decode the multiple, overlapping messages and meanings in each image, as well as, the new context of the media and environment where the image is viewed.
Chris Kitze 2006
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