Adobe's Photoshop turns 14 years old this month. In the NYT, this article on the work of German painter turned photographer Loretta Lux, who uses the ubiquitous image-editing software on portraits of children — to magnificent effect.
With so many choices at her fingertips, she has opted for delicate, minute alterations. Walking through her show of children's portraits at the Yossi Milo Gallery in Chelsea, one continually wonders if the boys and girls in her studies are software simulations, and why and to what degree they might be at the mercy of the artist's hand.
In fact, Ms. Lux has carefully costumed and photographed her subjects and, after scanning the image, dropped the figures into a separately scanned background, often taken from one of her paintings. She erases irrelevant details — fireplaces, cats, toys — until the children are settled in a neutral, dreamlike space.
An eerie result is children who seem willed into existence by Ms. Lux (her puppet master's strings are evident in the slightly distended heads and limbs and in the pastel tints) but who also have the air of self-created beings, a race of tiny Nordic monsters, spawned inside her computer but now genetically mutated and struggling with her for domination.
Link (Thanks, Susannah!), and link to gallery website (thanks Ken!)
