Thing #7: Digital Images

Being an art librarian and all--and that (among other things) for most of my lengthy career--I'm truly amazed at the impact of digital imagery on both the study of art history and the practice of art and design. I could go on for days about this (fear not, I won't) but just to hit some of the high points:

1. Studying art history. When I was an art history major, I had to walk six miles in the snow...OK, I lie. It was more than six miles but I drove; I only had to walk around campus. But it was SUNY at Buffalo, so you can bet that sometimes it was in the snow. Studying for those frequent and infamous "slide identification" tests meant coming to the reserves collection of the library and spending hours studying the pictures (usually in books) that were likely to be on the test. Nowadays students do it on their computers--no driving, no snow. Wearing their jammies, cat on their lap. Young whippersnappers!

2. Photography as documentation. For years the photograph was viewed as a record of something real--a place or event. It's certainly possible to mess with pre-digital photography, either to hoax (such as the famous fairy photographs that fooled Arthur Conan Doyle) or for artistic purposes (see the work of Jerry Uelsmann, for example). But digital imagery makes it so easy--not to mention scarily convincing if done well. Think about the progress of CGI in movies, or the journalists who've gotten into hot water (or the unemployment office) for doctoring suposedly "documentary" photographs.

3. Images in libraries. When I was a baby art librarian, color images were very expensive. It meant buying a book that cost hundreds of dollars (stop laughing, you STM people) because of the cost of high-quality color printing . Then I started to see inexpensive books coming with a CD (or just a CD by itself) with hundreds of color images--making large collections of images available to a wide audience--images that would have been impossibly expensive to disseminate in printed books. Now there's a vast amount of digital imagery on the web. Some of it is still expensive, because it's in a subscription database, but a lot is free to look at--many museums and galleries throughout the world have stunning collections available to anyone with an internet connection. (The Fine Arts Musuems of San Francisco's "ImageBase" being one of the best--see (http://www.famsf.org/). I'm not even getting into the impact of historical and scientific/medical imagery. I'm just getting amazed all over again as I look at the vast change just over the last 30-40 years. Maybe not as spectacular a change as during my grandmother's life...she was born before the Wright Brothers flew and was with me when we watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. But cool nonetheless.