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San Francisco-based photographer Doris Mitsch is no stranger to technology. Mitsch's first job after graduating from Stanford University in 1987 was at Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), where she worked on the launch of HyperCard and the futuristic film The Knowledge Navigator. She uses a Power Mac G4 to render her images digitally.
Mitsch uses a scanner, rather than a digital camera, to input her subjects. Her "scanography" has won awards and been featured in such publications as Wired and International Design. Her work can be seen this month at the Berkeley Art Center (through June 5th) and year-round at ClampArt in New York City.
Mitsch recently spoke with MacNewsWorld about the ways in which she creates her art, the importance technology plays in creating her art, and her ongoing relationship with Apple and the Mac. Here is what she had to say:
MacNewsWorld: How do go about choosing your images?
Doris Mitsch: Sometimes I'll come across some object that intrigues me, like a datura flower, which has so many interesting angles to it, and sometimes I go out looking for a particular thing I want to photograph. I've been saving birds' nests for years.
I'm more interested in exploring the subjects' formal qualities -- shape, color, texture and so forth -- than in making a picture that's necessarily recognizable as a shell, a flower, or whatever. Paul Valéry said, "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees," and that's pretty much what I'm aiming for when I work. The large scale helps -- when you look at an image like "Construction 6," a bird's nest, at its largest size, you see it first as a mysterious, intricate construction, and might not even notice it's a bird's nest. At least one person who looked at that particular series of photographs didn't. He assumed they were of sculptures I had made. Some of my favorites are almost abstract.
MNW: Describe the process you use to make your images. Does the process differ when you scan a rose petal from a bird's nest?
Mitsch: No, it's generally the same process. First I spend a long time examining the subject from different angles, then positioning it different ways on the scanner and making a series of quick, small scans as tests before I make the final, large scan. Then I do hours, sometimes days, of work in Photoshop.
MNW: How do you employ Photoshop in the process? How important is your Mac G4 in the process? Also what scanner or other peripherals or software do you employ?
Mitsch: I use Photoshop for the kind of finessing that photographers traditionally do in the darkroom -- for example, dodging and burning the image to bring out or reduce detail in certain areas -- as well as the retouching tasks that Photoshop is so popular for, removing specks of dust, for example, and there are a hell of a lot of those when you're scanning something like a bird's nest. I'm using a Mac G4 with a lot of RAM and two internal hard drives, and an Epson flatbed scanner. I back up my images on an external hard drive and also burn two CDs for each one.
MNW: Has your graphic design background influenced either your work or the way in which you produce it?
Mitsch: Well, over the years I got to be pretty comfortable with the tools, so I can concentrate on the image and not on the technical work involved. The speed makes a difference, too: Though I used to shoot film -- and developed and printed it in a darkroom -- I always found it a long time to wait between snapping a picture and seeing how (or whether) it turned out. So working digitally gives me great control and immediate gratification. In a matter of minutes I can go from holding an interesting object in my hand, to seeing how it works in a photograph.
MNW: I'm guessing that you have used Macs at least since you joined Apple in 1987. What brought you to the Mac to begin with? What did the Mac first offer you that traditional art or graphic design processes didn't?
Mitsch: On the screen, the ink never dries. This frees you up to experiment more, try things different ways before finding your final approach. The "undo" command changed my life. And it also means you can keep making minute adjustments as long as you want, on as detailed a level as you want. I use the "zoom" tool constantly too, making tweaks at such a magnified level that other people would never notice some of them in the final print.
While I'm working, I save many iterations of an image and make frequent use of Photoshop's "History" function to go backward and forward as I make and remake decisions. I think that if I were applying the same level of obsessiveness to darkroom printing, I'd end up making scores of prints before I had a keeper.
MNW: How do you think your work would differ if you didn't have the technology that the Mac and your peripherals and software provide?
Mitsch: Well, first, without this kind of freedom to make mistakes, I'd experiment less, and the difference that would have made would be huge, though it's hard to say exactly what it would have been.
Also, a surprising thing technology has done for me is blur, somewhat, the boundaries between photography and painting.
Painting, for me, used to be a bit more about making -- in the sense that a painting is the accumulation of marks left by the movements of the artist -- and photography was a bit more about finding -- using the camera to capture something that caught my eye. I'm oversimplifying here. Obviously there's a lot more to each medium, and the work I do on an image between saving the "raw" scan and producing a final print is not really that different from what can still be done using traditional methods, in the studio and during the development and printing processes afterward.
But now, with Photoshop, I'm working directly on the image instead of with the lights or the camera or the enlarger. I might take an hour or so to make a scan and then spend eight more hours in Photoshop stroking different areas of the picture with various tools, making and remaking hundreds of decisions about which way to push the picture. It's a slow, meditative process, similar to what painting is like for me. In fact, there are a lot of similarities between my paintings and my photographs these days, which didn't use to be the case.
MNW: What brought you to Apple after you graduated from college?
Mitsch: I had some design experience and Mac skills, which got me a job in Apple's creative department. I was lucky to work for Hugh Dubberly, who was then the creative director of a group that was exploring new ways the Mac could be used in design. I remember someone in my group attached a video camera to a Mac Plus to capture images as stills in one-bit black and white, which could then be touched up in MacPaint. I messed around with that a lot; I guess that was my first experience with digital imaging.
MNW: According to your bio, you worked on HyperCard development. Describe what sort of work you did for it -- and, if you could, provide a brief description of what HyperCard was, for those who aren't familiar with it.
Mitsch: I worked on the design of communications materials for the introduction of HyperCard -- software that could be considered a predecessor to today's Web authoring tools, though the interactive documents you could make with it weren't put on the Internet. You could create "cards" -- basically the same idea as Web pages -- connected to each other via arbitrary links in the text or graphics. These links could go to other cards within the same document, or "stack" of cards, or to cards in other stacks.
In those pre-Web days, this was a new and somewhat confusing concept to most people. My role was to help figure out how to show how it could be used, which involved creating sample HyperCard projects (such as an interactive history time line), as well as working on an interactive supplement to Apple's annual report for that year.
MNW: What was Apple's culture like during the years you worked for the company?
Mitsch: When I joined the company, I think the average age of employees was 26. There was a palpable youthful energy, which was infectious and exciting. The Mac had been out for just three years, and there was a real feeling that we were changing the world with a revolutionary concept.
MNW: What advancements in technology would you like to see from Apple? Are there things you envision yourself doing that require a technology that isn't presently available?
Mitsch: Futurist Paul Saffo famously said, "Never mistake a clear view for a short distance." Apple is so great at inventing technologies that shorten the distance between an idea and the realization of that idea, first with the Mac twenty years ago, and more recently with products like iLife and GarageBand.
Now you don't have to have access to facilities like darkrooms, studios -- not to mention teams of experts -- to take an idea amazingly far on your own. I want more technologies that not only don't get in an artist's way, but actually give us more direct ways of working.
I do wish the CPUs were more upgradeable, though. It's hard to justify buying a new, three-thousand-dollar machine every few years.
