The interesting thing might be to sit down with you and see what could be done. No doubt we’d both learn something. But playing around on my own and then sending you a new version is too low-bandwidth to be useful unless I have a particular vision of what I’d like to do, which at the moment I don’t. And I’m too busy doing final work on my own images for a show next week…

I would be fascinated to see what the two of you have already done with this image. Would it be worthwhile uploading the 14 MB file for anyone who wants to experiment with it?

Taking a finished original and corrupting it through a scan to produce something new could be argued to be something other than what is meant by the score and performance thing. However, the interesting part of your question to me is:

Could a photographer do something interesting …… that might not have occurred to Hanneke?

The first thing that I did when I grabbed the web version was to turn it monochromatic. Most of my pictures are black and white and this probably gives me a different way of seeing the subject than Hanneke. The resulting mono picture, interestingly, becomes a picture of the cup in use, rather than a picture of strawberries supported by a cup. The focus of interest becomes the painted design on the cup. It is not such a striking picture that way, but it is something that someone might conceivably produce.

The other thing I did was to experiment with the relationship between cup and background. Given how unimportant the background is as painted, I reduced the background still further. This sort of experimentation is easy digitally, of course, but similar things have always been done as ‘what if’ exercises.

Steve has already made the point about the loss of information in creating an 8 bit jpg (quite possibly your scanner could produce 12 or 14 bit tiffs). A 14mb file would be considered fairly small as a scan from an original this size. Onwards manipulation of something that has already gone through a lossey compression quickly results in artefacts that become ugly.

I didn’t mention the lighting to begin with as this is hardly my specialty, but to my eyes the multiple light sources are clear. The thing that stands out is the strength of the base shadow. Given the multiple light sources, this shadow seems too deep.

The question of a textured surface to the artwork and the tactile nature that this gives is an interesting one. Traditionally colour photos have not had a surface that has been important to the photo, whilst some monochrome workers have used the paper surface as an important element.

The choice of paper surface has increased greatly for photographers who use ink rather than silver. This doesn’t show up on the web because nobody much prints a print to scan for the web. The web versions are compressed copies of the print file.

Colin

No doubt a digital artist (photographer or not) could create a different work of art from that file, though you could question how “original” it would be. As a matter of fact, when studying the shading of the cup, I took the online (low resolution) file and changed the shading. It did look more natural to me with it darker on the right, though of course I wasn’t aware of the light source over there; it isn’t obvious in the shadows on the table. Changing tonality can strongly affect the impact of an image, and it wouldn’t be hard to make this one feel quite different. Of course, there are more drastic opportunities like combining this with other images. However, as Colin said, it can easily seem forced if it isn’t the work of an artist who cares personally about the result.

Colin wrote “It is an old saw within photography that the negative is the score and the print is the performance. Digital photography hasn’t changed this basic idea.”

The image here is based on a 1200 dpi scan in jpg format. It is 14 MB in size. Is this a print, or a negative? If it is a negative, what scope is there for the performance?

You wrote “one thing I like about painting is the tactility that comes from the brushstrokes.” In the 14 MB file, you can see a great amount of the detail of the brushstrokes.

Could a photographer do something interesting with such a file that might not have occurred to Hanneke? Could a photographer take this file and use it to create an original work?