Photoshopping Contests

A number of digital photography sites sponsor contests challenging people to use Photoshop on an existing image (or images) to respond to a certain verbal prompt.

• Flickr has a Photoshop Contest group (674 members)with a weekly contest to modify a supplied image. Sometimes the proposer may also stipulate thematic guidelines (e.g. Contest Week 88: "This week's challenge is to create a souvenier postcard to a real city (this is the Denver Art Museum, if you're wondering) or your own mythical land.")
• Fark has daily challenges, supplying an image and instructing "Photoshop this." These aim for humor, and sometimes one must know the original photograph in order to grasp the humor of the changes.
• Somethingawful also has a weekly "contest" (open only to members; no rankings): one member states a theme and offers an example. Themes specify topics (e. g., Classic Art After Hours, Historical Inaccuracies, Giant Pet Invasion). The purpose generally is parody. Each week has 32 "solutions."
• PhotoshopContest displays archives of 640 contests (from 2005 on), many with 80 or more entries. The prompt is an image, but voting points can be gained for five different attributes: authentic looking, skillfully executed, funny pics, creative ideas, overall theme. Limited by relying solely on image prompt. example--highest number of points ever.
• photoshoptalent is also huge, with 349 contests archived in the last six months of 2006 averaging two to three dozen entries each. Both image and theme prompts are used, with image prompts predominating; all contests are archived by one or two word abbreviations for either image or theme.
• worth1000.com is one of the older contest sites. It too maintains concurrent contests with numerous entries. It stands a bit apart from the others in that its prompts specify a topic (Corporate Takeovers, Mass Destruction, Revenge of the Animals, the Seven Deadly Sins [SDS]); others call for a formal or stylistic alteration of some image (Pimp My Ren, RoboRen, Literalisms, Subtle Change, Invisibles [all exposed flesh is removed], Ghosts, Puppets}. {Notre: "Ren" means a work from the classical fine art archive.) One example image illustrating the transformation sought accompanies the prompt. This is a different kind of constraint that those posed by the source-image contests. The results are further constrained to be photorealistic and single image (not collage or multiple photomontage) and must be made from existing image(s). The contests call only for two effects: WOW and humor, with humor second to WOW (difficulty and craftsmanship are the most frequently mentioned traits in the comments viewers attach to the entries).

I will group examples into several types:

1. American Monuments and Icons
2. Famous Events
3. Masterpieces of History of Art
4. Icons of Popular Culture
5. Adverts and Propaganda

Monuments:

The great American monuments, like the Statue of Liberty and Mt. Rushmore, have been photographed and painted countless times with various angles and aspects highlighted, as for example Lee Friedlander's famous photograph of tourists viewing Mt. Rushmore, a reflection of which appears in the plate glass window behind them. This image is not one of the canonical versions that come up in Google Images on a search for Mt. Rushmore; rather it is a de-monumentalized version emphasizing its social function as a tourist attraction. None of Friedlander's many photographs of monuments are heroicizing (see for example his photo ofthe John Paul Jones monument in Washington, D. C. and his photo of the Mechanics Monument in San Franciso).

Another way is the photoshopping way, though of course the tourist aspect is ignored in favor of a mixing of historical and fictional American icons--of great Presidents and great monster, all hugely larger than life, all mythological?

Events:

The standard (and textbook) photographs of President Kennedy's assassination (and Lee Harvey Oswald's by Jack Ruby), the girl wailing over the body of a student slain by the Ohio National Guard on the Kent State University campus, Eddie Adam's photograph of General Loan shooting a suspected Vietcong agent--all of these are classic images of some of the horrific events of the 1960's and are sorry counterparts to the photograph of the marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima. Our feelings toward these photographs and the events they respresent are an obligatory part of public piety in America and perhaps the human race. As such, they are frequently photoshopped, sometimes deflatingly and sometimes polemically. The Iwojima photo by Joe Rosenthal, for instance, has been deflated by changing the flag raised to a Hammer and Sickle communist flag, a Japanese flag, and a McDonald's triple arch, as well as having the soldiers raising a stepladder to change a light bulb. These photoshoppers seem to respond to a propagandistic exploitation of the original photo, of which Clint Eastwood has had a good bit to say recently in Flag of Our Fathers.

Similarly, horror of the Eddie Adams photograph of General Loan has been deflected by replacing the pistol blowing the man's life away into a Starbuck's Coffee mug and as a spray bottle the general clown is using to spray the suspect clown. The coffee mug version is not a complete denial of culpability insofar as it touches the theme of globalization of American brands. And as for the clowns, the photograph appears in a "clowns" contest ("Modify a photograph by substituting clowns for the people in the photo"). I include the photo so that you can judge how funny it is. In fact, I don't find it funny at all; it fails to deflect the horror. Perhaps because the figures are just wearing clown face paint and hats, the photo looks like a re-enactment rather than a parody.

This piece by George Malmberg (1997) on the Kent State killings is unusually explicit and indeed polemical in intent. Here the Iwojima Icon is reversed and signifies the ultimate betrayal of liberty. No whimsy here, no playing with the possible, and very little left unsaid. Notice that it does also include texts. I find the strategy of intensifying the horror by running the girl through with the flag pole somewhat over the top--the spearing is a metaphor, after all, but is rather too close to the actual physical horror of the dead student's body. This sort of treatment has more currency immediately after an outrage; it seems forced after 28 years.

The second version is a recent entry in a Historical Inaccuracies contest at somethingawful.com and is meant to represent an event in the past that definitely did not happen. In these depictions of a more desirable past, photoshoppers are delighting in the powers of digital imaging to document the unreal, or, one might say, undocument the real.

The Oswald assassination is a less charged event than the assignation of the President. The original photo is most similar to the top one, though it too has been photoshopped to include the Web mystery figure of the Tourist of Death (aka Waldo), who stands just to the right of Oswald (with the glasses). This figure first rocketed to Internet fame in a photo of him standing on an observation deck of the World Trade Center as the passenger plane was just about to crash into it. (The photo was said to have been found in the camera, which turned up in the rubble.) The second version is by George Malmberg (c.1996) ("Doctorcosmo") and is discussed in Craig Stroup's articles. It is, he says, the most frequently downloaded of his images.

If you know about the Tourist of Death, or have a very acute visual memory, number one will not fool you. None of the versions seeks to be taken as the true and accurate version of what occurred. Rather, they infect the original photograph with a suspicious fictionality: it is about as easy to believe that Batman and the Joker, or the Tourist of Death, were there in the Dallas police station, as that Jack Ruby (whoever he was) got in with a gun and was able to shoot the assasin of the President.

Masterpieces of History of Art

A good bit of photoshopping effort goes into revisions of "classic" or "ren" paintings. This creates a collapse of time (the-past-in-the-present, the-present-in-the-past) that can work in some of the ways Walter Benjamin attributed to the dialectical image. Perhaps the largest number of these are based on inserting the face of a contemporary celebrity into a familiar painting. (Sometimes when the painting is muich less familiar, it is supplied as a Source.) At the left is an example not of a painting but Houdon's famous bust. At times one rejects the implicit identification as ludicrous; here we might say “Anthony Hopkins is no Ben Franklin”, but then again, Ben Franklin wasn't either. Hopkins playing Franklin--you could probably get financing for that.

Another group inserts bits of contemporary (or post contemporary) technology (Ipods, electronic guitars and other instruments, motorcycles, cooling towers, cyborgian body parts, etc.) into scenes of art-historical yore, usually producing mild amusement along with admiration of the maker's skill. Here we might also include contemporary behavior such as drinking beer, smoking, snorting, even mainlining drugs, which often take us back to the funny-ha-ha. The effect is usually to point out some detail of modern life that is not part of the world of the painting as filtered for us by High Art. At its best, however, the result can be an almost uncanny harmony of past and present that collapses our sense of anachrony; the vision of the past joins with and flows into the present.

The cyborgian ones engage us because the cyborgian body's mating of flesh and machine is still produces unease in us. The paintings with delightfully sensual surfaces--like Bourguereau's--are especially rewarding. And one has to wonder whether Leonardo would be excited by the machinery enhancing Cecilia Gallarani and her ermine. For some reason, this is far more interesting than seeing Charlize Theron made into a puppet. (See tutorial)

The most famous paintings of certain artists are chosen as the source so many times that it carries us beyond cliché: Mona Lisa, Starry Night, Man with the Blue Guitar, American Gothic, The Girl with the Pearl Earring, The Scream, The Persistence of Memory, The Last Supper, Primavera, The Nighthawks, Whistler's Mother and the Lord Imparting the Spark of Life to Adam--the perennial top sellers in the college print store ten-dollar bin. But also David's Death of Marat and Caillebotte's Paris: A Rainy Day. A good number of these revisions are direct descendants of Marcel Duchamp's LHHOQ, deflating, perhaps, rather than desecrating, perhaps because of total aura-loss from over-reproduction. Others fall into a shock class and excite little thought after the shock dissipates. Such is the case with a recent run of revisions of David's Death of Marat. We get him OD'ed, as a cyborg, Curt Cobain with smoking shotgun, and the complex fusion on the left, which is an entry (by "IZO") in a Classic Art After Hours contest at soemthingawful.com (Photoshop Phriday). In this version, Marat may not be dead—at least not from Charlotte Corday's stabbing: there is no blood on the rim of the bathtub and a wine bottle has been added suggesting the end of intense partying, but he is at least totally unconscious and has various skinhead inspired inscriptions written upon him. He is not holding a pen; in fact, his limp arm ends in a bucket (added)—perhaps an allusion to the old fraternity prank of putting a passed-out drunk's hand in a bucket of warm water, inducing him to piss himself.(Illustration can be found in Google with search string "hand in bucket".) Some of this insignia escape me; the shadowy monsters coming out of the darkness, however, are from Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare, where the sleeper's arm also trails in a complete stupor. Except for the galvanized bucket, which is only mildly anachronous at most, the only intrusions from the present (or ties to the present) are the swastika, the men's room penis, and the contemptuous homophobic words printed quitely legibly (and in English, more or less) on his arms and chest. It may be that photoshoppers think David's Marat does not look freshly murdered and thus choose to regard him as unconscious. If you want to see dead according to contemporary notions, look at PFRO's Marat-Cobain (scroll to bottom if you must), which should put an end to prettifying death for a while. Even this is not quite so bloody as yet another remake in which Marat's head lies beside his hand on the floor and the words Helter Skelter are smeared on the wall in blood. That gruesome reminder of Modern Murder makes us appreciate the "rationality" of political assassination in the Reign of Terror. And let that be the end of this branch of Ancients vs. Moderns.

Norman Rockwell is certainly no Renaissance painter, even in the very broad sense of the photoshoppers, but he does have a recognizable style and a famous knack for cute and upbeat genre painting and carved out for himself the role of premier celebrant of the American Way of Life. Arsidubu, the maker of this Rockwell revision, has become one of the leaders the the rankings at worth1000. This is one of his several Rockwells. Willie Gillis was a figure of Rockwell's World War illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post—the good soldier— who in 1946 ended the series by going to college on the GI bill. The Saturday Evening Post cover illustrating Willie Gillis at college is the basis for the revision at the left. In the original, the name written on the text books are Willie and Gillis; in this version, one book has been removed and the other has the name Floyd. In the righthand corner was a bag of golf clubs; it is replaced with a guitar amplifier, and a guitar has replaced the book in Gillis's hands. So far, a pretty standard piece of photoshopping. The view from the window has changed, however, from the steeple of the college library (or what have you) to the rather urban setting of a factory with smokestacks. And, up in the air over the factory, a flying pink pig. This was the cover for the Pink Floyd album Animals (1977) and was developed from an actual photograph, helium-filled pig and all, of the Battersea power generating station in South London. Animals is surely one of the darkest albums ever made: in society, you can be a sheep, a dog, or a pig, all of whom sink down to death and destruction. Aside from the guitar and amp, the present (now somewhat past) of 1977 scarcely penetrates the privileged world of Willie's college room.

For a second, similar example, though working present-into-past and by a different artist (MA1947), see The Cheerleader. (The original is Bouguereau's Femme Nue au Coquillage [1885]).