Jennifer in Paradise was the title given by John Knoll, one of the original creators of Photoshop, to a holiday snap he took of his then-girlfriend (now wife) Jennifer, sitting on a beach in Bora Bora in the South Seas in 1987. With her back to the camera, the topless subject can be seen sitting in the shallows, gazing out at a green mountain on the opposite side of the bay. This snapshot went on to become what is generally considered to be the first ‘photoshopped’ image in history. The invention of Photoshop is commonly regarded as marking the point at which the documentary value of photographic images could no longer be trusted, despite the fact that prior to this, analogue photographs had also been widely manipulated with the aid of retouching and other techniques. With Photoshop, however, images could now be freely formed and transformed – painting could be done with a computer mouse. In Scheibitz’s painting, Jennifer – whoever she may be – does indeed find herself in a very different kind of paradise. If you look closely, you can still find references to Knoll’s photograph as a picture-within-a-picture: the outline of a mountain can be seen, with something like a posing figure next to it. Apart from that, however, Jennifer’s paradise consists mainly of elements drawn from Scheibitz’s personal archive of forms. These are derived from many interesting sources. In his studio, for example, there is a visual atlas he has compiled, which traces motifs from the art of antiquity to the Renaissance to contemporary advertising and photojournalism. It is an alphabet of forms, which naturally also include
Excerpt
from “Associative Optionality: Speculations on Jennifer in Paradise by
Thomas Scheibitz” | Peter
Richter (Art Critic and Author)
