Photo: Josef Astor for The New Yorker
Even if you have no interest in fashion or photography, read how Pascal Dangin has used a keyboard and mouse to become one of the world’s most prolific — though anonymous — artists. Dangin’s work appears every month in every high-end magazine. He improves photos, and the look of reality, by manipulating it all in his computers.
The obvious way to characterize Dangin, as a human Oxy pad, is a reductive one–any art student with a Mac can wipe out a zit. His success lies, rather, in his ability to marry technical prowess to an aesthetic sensibility: his clients are paying for his eye, and his mind, as much as for his hand. Those who work with Dangin describe him as a sort of photo whisperer, able to coax possibilities, palettes, and shadings out of pictures that even the person who shot them may not have imagined possible.
To construct Annie Leibovitz’s elaborate tableaux–the “Sopranos” ads, for example–he takes apart dozens of separate pictures and puts them back together so that the seams don’t show. (Misaligned windows are a particular peeve.)
He has been known to work for days tinting a field of grass what he considers the most expressive shade of green. “Most green grass that has been electronically enhanced, you know, you look at it and you get a headache,” Dangin said recently. He prefers a muted hue–”much redder, almost brown in a way”–that is meant to recall the multilayered green of Kodachrome film.
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