Adanto's '3D: Darkly Digital & Divine'

. . . New cameras, printing techniques, and software 

allow artists greater freedom than ever before to take 

photographs of the real world and to generate images from

 the imagination. Indeed, the medium's value to myth-makers 

and storytellers has increased enormously with digital 

photography's capacity to seamlessly merge and morph

 pictorial elements, which poses a challenge to 

photography's historical documentary nature. 

Never has this been more true than now. . . .*

~ Robert Adanto, Documentary Filmmaker

The clip below, with photographer Lisa Holden, is from documentary filmmaker Robert Adanto's 3D: Darkly Digital & Divine, which explores digitization and its influence on photography, manipulation of images and visual truth, and, more generally, our "post-photographic" future. The film includes interviews with, among others, Jamie Baldridge, Julia Fullerton-Batten, Ruud van Empel, Erwin Olaf, Sabine Pigalle, Vee Speers, and Tereza Vickova. The film's director of photography is Alana McVerry.

Adanto's debut film was the feature-length The Rising Tide (2008), an essay on the contemporary art scene in China; it looks specifically at the work of photographers and video artists. See a clip here. The California-based Adanto also is the producer-director of Pearls on the Ocean Floor (2010), which profiles 16 female artists inside and outside Iran and examines how they use their art to overcome stereotypes about their identity, gender, culture, and religion. Brief clips from Pearls on the Ocean Floor may be viewed here, here, here, and here.

Lisa Holden in Robert Adanto's 3D: Darkly Digital & Divine from Robert Adanto on Vimeo.

Additional clips from 3D may be seen here and here.

* Source: Selection from Adanto's "Photographic Reality" Statement