1986 (7 negatives)
From Hags book ‘How Things Are’
’I am so angry at the stupidity of man. Anger being the word. The Industrial Revolution was forged by the technologies that we had developed from man’s desire to be able to kill his fellow man more efficiently than his enemy. Why do we waste so much of our resources on being ready to kill or be killed? Are we not indeed stupid men?’
Stupidity of Man was created from the commissioned trade advertisement shown below for Borkeys. Borkeys was the black and white section of the photo lab Studio 10 which serviced the Advertising Industry with pre-print graphics. It took 127hrs over 21 days including photography to create and was then hand tinted by Borkeys retoucher Kim Harris.
Every element was a simile or pun of a service they provided. A numbered outline drawing of the image in the bottom right containing each element referred to a list of these services as described below.
Transfers, transistor radio and fur. Slides, hair slides. Enlargements, the magnifying glass. Composites or Comps, the jigsaw puzzle. Photography, snaps, the snapped wood. Cells, a collection of cell batteries below the tin cans. Retouching, the paint brush and figure being touched. Strip Ups collage or montage, the peeling wall. Dispatch, man sitting at the desk pointing at his eye patch as in dis-patch. He is wearing a joke Toucan hat the meaning of which has been lost in the mists of time. These were all commonly used terms in the industry most of which have now disappeared in our Digital age.
The model Kev, a printer at Borkeys where Hag also worked freelance as a ‘Comper’, the term then commonly used for a photographic printer who made Comps, Composites or Multiple Prints. This is now known as combination printing.
The name Borkeys written on the tin cans Hag replaced in Stupidity of Man with the gathering of people from the stage of the Knebworth Festival 1978 where he was photographing the band Brand X for their third album cover Masques.
The painting is by the Pre Raphalite artist Ford Maddox Brown titled ‘Work’ which in Victorian times controversially expressed the inequalities of labour. Hag intended this to be a subtle message as expressed in this video.
Hag used the top of this image without the painting in Power Struggle which then after further changes became the wrapped cover for his book ‘How Things Are’.
1989 (Digitally Coloured)
(7 negatives)
Hag digitally colourised four of his pictures; Genesis, Stupidity of Man, Storm in a Teacup and Rock & Roll. for the first digital imaging exhibition ‘Machine Dreams’ at The Photographers Gallery London UK in 1989.
A ‘Sci Tex high end digital image manipulation system’ was used at Studio 10 London to create these for the first digital imaging exhibition ‘Machine Dreams’ at The Photographers Gallery London UK in 1989.
The Sci Text system with computer and associated hardware, drum scanners, half inch tape readers/recorders, monitors & output onto large format colour transparency film up to 16 x 12 inches with a digital laser printer cost around £1 million in the early 1980’s, about £3.5 million in 2024.
Of course this pales to insignificance compared to what today’s computers are capable of at a small fraction of the cost. We can have it in our pocket. Here we stand at the dawn of AI imaging making most of this stuff redundant including knowledge, understanding and truth.
It appears that reality is becoming starkly individual.
Are we approaching a time where we no longer have a common shared reality? This has always been true in the sense that we all have differing lives in differing circumstances which we interpret through our individual filters and necessities. Now it seems the fundamentals of that reality is blatantly being distorted.
The camera does not lie has never been true.
This tinted version is not found in the book ‘How Things Are’
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Created by Hag without the use of a computer by Combination printing.
Collage Montage Surreal Photography.
