Has Photoshop Made Us Cynical?

In a new show at Flowers Gallery in the U.K., six artists present work that plays with our expectations of manipulated images from all angles. When Adobe originally released Photoshop in the mid-1990s, the program was designed to mimic the physical tools and techniques of the darkroom: burning and dodging, for example. As the software developed, these analog references have melted away, overshadowed by tools invented specifically for digital images: the magnetic lasso (introduced in 1998), the red-eye eraser (a 2005 addition), and dozens of others. The software has even changed the way we talk about images, with its name now perhaps more often used as a verb. A group show at London’s Flowers Gallery this month takes its name from an Anglo slang term for photoshopping: Brush It In. Work from six young artists--most of whom aren’t dedicated photographers--examines the val...