ClampArt is pleased to announce “The Evolution of the Digital Portrait,” an exhibition of photography and video with works by Nancy Burson, Aziz+Cucher, Loretta Lux, Jill Greenberg, Simen Johan, Gregory Scott, Jake Rowland, Marc Yankus, EJ Major, and Noah Kalina.

Best known for pioneering new technology in digital photography since the late 1970s, artist Nancy Burson is the starting point for the exhibition. Over twenty-five years ago, Burson helped develop software with scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that enabled the construction of composite portraits. Burson’s early photography set the stage for a variety of artistic and non-artistic developments in digital imaging technologies that have since profoundly changed our society in aspects we are only now beginning to recognize.

Similarly, artists Aziz+Cucher were among the first to exploit the creative possibilities afforded by digital imaging. In the early to mid-1990s Aziz+Cucher developed work commenting upon the waxing loss of identity in a technological environment that promotes anonymity and conformity. This bleak reading of the intersection of technology and culture is echoed in other works included in the exhibition by Loretta Lux, Simen Johan, and Jake Rowland, whose employment of digital imaging is very much part of the message. Other contributors to the show, however, employ digital photography more as an adept but ultimately innocuous sort of tool to address disparate points of import. A diverse array of photographs by Jill Greenberg, Gregory Scott, Marc Yankus, and EJ Major speak of the range of work presently produced by digital means. And Noah Kalina, the youngest artist in the exhibition, uses digital photography as a matter of fact, harnessing a technology that is so second nature, so innately engrained, it requires no elaborate address as he stitches together thousands of self portraits taken over the past six years in a looping video.