The purpose of this study is to better understand digital photography by focusing on seven artists who produce seamless digital-synthesized photographs. Data was collected from interviews, artist statements, artists’ publications, and critics’ reviews of their work. Questions asked of the data include: “Do these artists’ photographs provide knowledge?” “What kinds of knowledge do their photographs provide?” Auxiliary yet more approachable questions include: “What are their views on reality?” “What notions of reality do they represent in their photographs?” “How do they visualize reality?” “What do their images expect of viewers?”
This study presents seven artists. The cross-artist analysis shows that seamless digital photography can be defined as a new medium with attributes of photography, painting, and cinema. In terms of the knowledge and styles this new medium creates, seamless digital photography is not new, but a revivification of the old. Digital photographs do not generate uniquely new knowledge, but combined knowledge that can already be found in history, including knowledge based in theories of realism, expressionist cognitivism, formalism, and postmodernism. Digital photographs do not invent a new style, but re-introduce and revise past artistic movements, such as realism, romanticism, and surrealism.
This study suggests that in order to appreciate and teach about the variety of knowledge provided by seamless digital photographs, art educators need to incorporate both the old and new paradigms – the appreciation of fine arts as old, and the critiques of visual culture as new – so as to pay attention to both the aesthetic features of artworks and a deepened understanding of their contexts.