Photography on the Web

The Internet, with its capacity to reach a global audience, has become a common place to show or use photography as an art form. Artists manage and share photographs online, display their work in web portfolios and home pages, and use images in interactive web projects. The Reframing Photography book gives step-by-step instructions of these three online processes:

1) how to use a photo sharing site to store, organize and publically present your photographs,
2) how to create a web portfolio on a home page as a means of presenting images of artworks, and
3) how to create web-based artworks using photographs.

The distinction here is that in the first two cases, we look at uploading images of pre-existing artworks for display on the internet. In the third demonstration, we explore how images can be created for web-based projects meant to be viewed via a monitor and to be navigated by an online browser. In this case, the monitor is not a secondary viewing setting, but the primary medium.

Creating Web-Based Artworks Using Photographs

Some artists make images expressly for web-based projects that are meant to be seen via a monitor and, usually, navigated by an online browser. In this case, the monitor is not a secondary viewing setting, but the ideal exhibition venue. Digitized for the web, photographs join other forms of media, such as sound, animation, hypertext, graphics, and video. In many cases, the works are interactive. Rather than presenting a series of still images that can be scrolled through or animated to appear as a movie, internet artists build photographic images into complex, participatory systems that change the relationship between artist, artwork and audience. The formerly passive viewer is now asked to make decisions about content, or to create and alter the work.

Artists such as Mark Amerika and Yael Kanarek have created web projects that are major works. Mark Amerika is known for his new media works on the web as well as in galleries and museums. Amerika carries the concept of hypertext through his work to connect images, text, and video. Works such as Filmtext 2.0 (www.markamerika.com/filmtext) are often related to network technology and how it changes the human individual. Yael Kanarek is well known for her ongoing, online project World of Awe. World of Awe is presented through the false interface of a semi-functional laptop, which contains computer generated image albums and diary entries from a forsaken, sandy planet (http://www.worldofawe.net).

See the book for discussion of how truth and fiction are conceived on the Internet.