For more than 10 years Maggie Taylor
took photographs with an old 4x5 camera she bought at a flea
market. Her setting was decidedly low-tech: Her sunny backyard
in Gainesville, Fla., where she arranged found objects that intrigued
her, from dead birds to pieces of rusted metal. Then, in January
1996, everything changed: She got a computer.
"The initial thought was maybe I could take a photograph
and scan it in the computer so I'd have a visual file I could
make alterations to, small changes. I was afraid in a way to
jump into it because I had this whole body of work that was photographic,
and I thought, if I do a few computer things, they wouldn't fit
in. I was kind of waiting for the right opportunity to push me
a little bit."
That opportunity came when a request came in for two pieces involving
Yosemite National Park. On a whim, she started using the scanner
as her camera.
"I realized the scanner kind of worked in a low tech way,
in the way my 4x5 camera did. That I could just set my objects
on it and it would give me something back. Right around the same
time Jerry (Taylor's husband, Jerry Uelsmann) and I went to a
Photoshop workshop for a few days and I loved it right away.
I started doing all the tutorials and teaching myself. I just
got more and more into doing my work digitally."
Nowadays, Taylor does all her work on a computer, and there's
no question that using a computer as opposed to a camera has
made differences in the artmaking process as well as the art
itself.
"I had used a computer before (for bookkeeping and the like).
I wasn't afraid of the technology. It was just a question of,
did I see it as an artmaking tool? Plus, I did like the idea
of going outside in the backyard, I'd find things in the garden,
it was kind of spontaneous and I wasn't sure how it would be
sitting inside the office all day. Sometimes it does get a little
tedious, I spend long hours here and I have to force myself to
get up because I get obsessed about how things look in the image.
It's exciting in one way, but it's also not as much of a fun,
interactive day as I used to have outside in the backyard."
If not always spontaneous, the computer has helped Taylor be
more productive. "I can do more images. Before, I would
photograph three or four different setups in one day and shoot
10 pieces of film for each one, then a few days later I'd print
the contact sheet and if I didn't like it, I'd have to reset
it up and reshoot everything again. It was a very slow way. Now
of course, I can do a small change, and leave it for a few days
and come back to the file and work on it some more. Of course,
all the options can become kind of a problem, that's the hardest
thing, to know when you're done and when something seems right."
One of the most fascinating discoveries about using the computer
as an "artmaking tool" is how Taylor's work itself
has been altered.
"I'm still working with the same types of objects and same
types of ideas, but when they were photographs they had a sense
of time. I set up objects as if on a stage, and the photograph
captured a moment. Sometimes you'd see a leaf that had fallen,
they had a reference to time, to the time they were taken. That's
all obliterated in the computer work because it isn't there to
begin with. It's a series of scans; there isn't really one moment
in time when the image is made. Because of that no longer being
one moment in time, they do have a different feel to them, kind
of like a painting.
"When I was making photographs, even though I was fabricating
the subject matter it had a definite connection to reality, they
were straight photographs. With the computer there's really only
this very fragile connection to reality, just the movement as
an object is scanned but some of that gets erased with the process
of putting together the image. You're erasing the connection
with reality."
It's this blurring of reality that makes Taylor's work both whimsical
and disturbing. For example, the man holding a goldfish on a
leash.
"I think it's playful because, well, it's a goldfish on
the leash. The man's face is blurred, it's a slightly humorous
take on a traditional portrait. And the wings to me are always
kind of playful, but they have other implications. Is he supposed
to be an angel? You don't know what's going on. It does have
a kind of haunting quality, at the same time. It's not like I
put these together with a specific meaning in mind. They're meant
to be interpreted by the viewer. When I put things together,
all my pictures are almost like self-portraits, the aspect of
my personality that's interested in things that are unsettling
comes out in my photographs. Because I'm working with bright,
saturated colors it would be fairly easy to make images that
are just very pretty. I want there to be some other undertone
or message to it."
- February 1999 
Back to Writings
Back to Gallery