Images and Pixels – Alan Winslow

The prompt for this assignment was to manipulate images or video on the pixel level. For a while now, I have been thinking about how we are inundated with images as a society. It would be difficult to go an entire day without seeing one. Does this make images less impactful? I think, to a certain extent, yes. Take Ansel Adams work in Yosemite as an example his black and white photographs shocked and awed people so much that they helped develop the National Park Service. Now we get a photo of Yosemite on our computer when we update operating systems. Does that image have the same impact as Ansel Adams? It’s technically perfect and aesthetically pleasing, but we’ve seen so many images of that same location that I think they’ve lost something. Don’t get me wrong I still believe that an image is one of the best storytelling devices, but sometimes it’s fun to experiment.

I wanted to take an image and break it down to its invidious R, G, B values per pixel for this project. With the hopes that we can take a fresh look at often photographed locations. To me, each one of these written values is a grain that we use to look at with a loop in the darkroom.

Here is the code: