David Beckley and Kevin Marshall
July 1 – August 1, 2015
Thursday Artwalk: July 2, 2015, 6 – 8 pm
Artists’ Reception: July 11, 5 – 8 pm
Front and Small Galleries
   

Right now, in your purse or your pocket, you probably have a better camera than even the most famous photographers had in the past. 

David Beckley and Kevin Marshall have taken this fact as a challenge to make photographs that you can’t take with a cell phone. Come see the two very different approaches they have imagined and brought to life at Gallery 110 in Seattle.

Artwork is not created in a vacuum, it does not and can not ignore historical and art-historical context. Photography was once considered a craft – not one of the fine arts. Today most of the terabytes (or petabytes) of photographs are not art.

But why not? This question introduces the inevitable craft/art dichotomy. One of the distinguishing markers of both art and craft is that the final product of the former is exceptional in some  way. But photography has become too common to be viewed as a definite marker of the fine arts.

We have chosen two very different routes to continue to use the photographic production values available to us. We now have to say the dreaded word: Photoshop.

We are going to make the case that Photoshop is a tool to move photography from craft to art. We realize this is a minority opinion. We realize that most uses of Photoshop are in the service of craft, and even deception. We make the case that that the production values available to us are even more enhanced by the vast possibilities offered by Photoshop. This application of technology results in pictures that widen the range of aesthetic experience for the viewer.