Anyone who has made vacation snaps pop and glow with heightened intensity knows the effect of the Instagram color-filter technique that can turn a photograph of the most banal landscape into the fiery furnace of a sunset.
A similar technique is being used beyond photography. The patterns that are spread over dresses or pants this winter are often digitally enhanced to make them brighter and bolder than nature. In fact, the less they resemble the botanical, the more fashionable they look.
Roses, larger than anything produced in the soil, swell across fabric with that sensual expression of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings from the 1920s.
But whereas it once took an artist a lifetime to create large-scale, artistic images, today’s hyper-reality is, literally, child’s play — hence the popularity of Instagram and other smartphone apps.
In the fashion world, it may take a sophisticated designer to work those patterns of burning bright blooms into something stylish and wearable, yet the actual process is just another computer click. The floral effects are rarely just sketched, more probably manipulated. The British designer Mary Katrantzou is an example of a designer whose computer skills have created a new genre of fashion prints.
The result is a winter offering of outfits so eye-poppingly bright that the display of the Marc Jacobs resort line at Colette, the Paris concept store, appears at first glance to have turned the sophisticated shop into a greenhouse.
Even if the clothes themselves are still quiet or pallid, as was once the norm for winter, that reality can be enhanced in a magazine by post production.
One of the quiet revolutions in fashion is the way that images in magazines have been transformed, so that the consumer is viewing hyper reality. Nothing is quite what it seems since post-production has become an intrinsic part of fashion photography, transforming the image. Over the past decade, photographers have turned art into a science, using the computer to change both the subject and the surrounding scenery.
No one has been more devoted to the possibilities of processing imagery than Nick Knight, the British photographer whose SHOWStudio first animated fashion by creating films at the same time as stills fashion shoots and now uses digital enhancement as an every-day process.
Such is his reputation for inventiveness and imagination — from his initial street snaps of British Punks to the Lady Gaga videos — that Mr. Knight has been selected as creative consultant by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He will work on “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” the Costume Institute exhibition in May 2013.
The Nick Knight flowers — the subject of “Flora,” the flower photography which he developed 15 years ago — have grown ever more painterly and dramatic.
In fact, it is hard to define his current floral work in intense colors that appear to drip from the petals as “photography.” He explains how he took the initial image to a laboratory in Los Angeles where the pigments were treated to make them “run,” creating a scissored effect on the edge of the petals and drips of color from the big blooms.
“I have become a painter of a surface,” says Mr. Knight, referring to the new rose images as “Photo/Paintings.”
The result of this innovative technique can be seen at an exceptional exhibition at the SHOWstudio space on Bruton Street in London, where both the intense new Rose photo/painting hybrids are on offer as well as 15 of the “Flora” works.
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