Lucas Blalock's Digital Toolkit | ART21 "New York Close Up"

[Greenpoint, Brooklyn]

[DOOR SLAMS]

[LIGHT SWITCH FLICKS ON]

[SOUND OF COMPUTER STARTING UP]

[New York Close Up]

["Lucas Blalock's Digital Toolkit"]

This is "The Smoker".

[SOUND OF CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKING]

That picture started off by me wanting to
make a picture of a smoker.

It sort of relates to this Magritte painting
from the late Forties.

I was going to have an exhibition in Brussels

and Magritte is from Brussels.

It seemed like a suitable environment for
this, sort of, game.

[SOUND OF CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKING]

[SOUND OF CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKING]

[Lucas Blalock, Artist]

I started using Photoshop when I was still
in undergrad.

It was just, like, a procedural tool.

Like, it was a replacement for the dark room.

It felt like special effects for a long time.

It felt just like something after the fact—

that it was, sort of, making up ground for
a picture.

It took me a long time to get to a place

where I understood how I might be able to
use it.

Around the time I read Bertolt Brecht's book
on theater—

he was talking about bringing the labor

that happened offstage—in a theater production—onto
the stage.

I started to think about the kinds of labor
I was hiding.

There are all these ways to, sort of, hide
your labor in Photoshop.

And I'd been really interested in, sort of,
undermining those things.

There are a lot of things the computer will
do for you

that don't need you,

and those have never been tools that I've
been particularly attracted to.

Like, I'm attracted to the ones that are sort
of the dumbest tools in Photoshop.

And I tend to use them in the most blunt way.

[1. Eraser Tool]

One of the rules of photography seems to be
that

the photograph needs to be homogeneous--

it needs to be one thing.

Usually that's one view.

I was really interested in how I add levels
of labor to photographs

without losing that sense of photographicness.

And the cutting through was part of that.

[2. Masking]

In commercial practice, masking is a way to

select the sky in a photograph and make it
a darker blue,

or to select someone's eyes in a photograph
and sort of brighten them up.

And for me, masking has sort of opened up
possibilities of drawing out relationships.

Like, when I saw this bag, it looked like
a human torso to me,

and when I took its picture,

that's sort of what was on my mind.

When I got the negative back, I started to
look for opportunities

to sort of enhance that relationship.

One of the tools that I've used a lot is the
clone stamp--

[3. Clone Stamp]

you would use to take out imperfections,

or you would use to remove a lamp post from
a street.

I think something with the clone stamp particularly
that I'm really excited about:

it's an activity that can be either additive
or subtractive.

So you could cover something up--

say, take an object out of the picture--

but if you did it poorly,

it would leave this, kind of, interference
pattern in the background.

There's been an anxiety about, sort of, you
know,

[4. Brush Tool]

"Why would you make another picture now?"

"What's the point?"

"There are pictures of everything already."

I really had started to think about photography
as an activity of drawing--

as a way to try to understand the world through
making a picture of it.

And this seems to be a continuation of the
historic activity of drawing--

like, drawing with a pencil.

When I started, what I was doing

was sort of making a burlesque of commercial
practice.

Because, really, these were the only people
who were using

digital effects in their pictures.

And so, I use all of the tools that I use

in a really similar way.

[SOUND OF CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKING]

They're all, really, this shovel, you know?

They're this extension of the finger.

[SOUND OF CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKING]

Being sort of stuck into space,

it's an entry into a space that I couldn't
enter any other way

but through Photoshop.

Humor, for me, has been an important thing
in my work

because it's a way to, sort of, bring people into
the room.

It's literally disarming.

Like, Buster Keaton,

or like, early cinema--

it's people who were incredibly effective

at drawing our understanding of the cinema.

Buster Keaton's gags give us a way to enter
movies.

Humor for me is about relationships.

It's about an invitation to relate to the
objects in the pictures,

and I think that more and more, as time has
gone on,

it's been also about relating to this sort
of

ambiguousness of photographing digital space

and the way that it's now being construed.

I believe in art because art makes new spaces.

Aesthetics is a way of, sort of, proto thinking--

of thinking before you can think these new
thoughts.

Even in the goofiest, most ridiculous way,

aesthetics is a way of, sort of, unpacking
possibility.