Last Updated on 04/22/2013 by Chris Gampat
The Huffington Post is running an interesting story right now on photographer Melanie Willhide. Willhide had her computer stolen along with the backup drive. After reporting the theft, police found her machine in the back of a car they pulled over. It was then returned to Willhide and she began the process of trying to recover the images after the thief did some minor work to wipe the hard drive.
Amazingly, Willhide’s images were actually made artistically better and similar to things (Like Andy Warhol’s Eight Elvises) that one would see in a MoMA exhibit. And now, Willhide wishes she had him as a student.
So how did this happen? When one tries to recover images sometimes, the files can be corrupted and not totally in their original state. Plus it depends on how the software you were using went about trying to recover and piece the data back together. My feeling (after recovering data cards for years) is that the images are also nowhere near full resolution. And Willhide is simply just embracing a technical glitch as art. Go figure.
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