Photographers began their return to the analog processes the very moment that digital imaging took hold, dedicating their practice to clunky cameras and collodion drips. As every aspect of contemporary life has become increasingly involved with technology, the marks of analog photography have infiltrated our modern digital images—not as natural consequences of the process, but as aesthetic additions. Blossoming with early image-editing apps like Hipstamatic and proliferating with the broad adoption of Instagram, analog aesthetics have moved beyond actual darkroom devotees and into the entire iPhone-wielding population. Though they are already falling out of use, so much of our contemporary image-based language passed through these digital filters. Still, across social media and the arts, contemporary digital photography has adopted the marks and artifacts of past image-making: rounded corners and vignettes, make-believe light leaks, orange-y Instagram filters speckled with digital dust.

Upon first viewing the work of French artist Fabienne Rivory, one would not be remiss to think that watercolor has simply been applied to the surface of photographs. The extent to which they have actually been altered only reveals itself over time: the pictures are photographic, but are not, strictly speaking, photographs. Rivory assembles photomontages of impossible, imagined landscapes, punctuating their surface with swaths of vibrant, dripping watercolors. 

Employing naturally occurring phenomena to build her dreamscapes, Rivory plays with the logic of her environment but never abandons it entirely. In the series Miroir, for instance, what appear to be glassy reflections on the surface of a pond aren’t reflections at all, but similarly-shaped skylines turned upside-down. Reflected trees don’t quite match their upright counterparts; heaping rock formations are built up, rounded out. The new landscapes do not stray unrecognizably far from reality but mimic and extend it, keeping close proximity. 

Meanwhile, in the series Abri—meaning shelter—the built landscape is pictured, single houses and buildings appearing as totems, the land beneath them expanded and replaced with sky. The new horizon line reassembles the landscape, the foreground emptied of its contents. While the watercolor additions in Miroir help build the landscape and envelop figures in its embryonic, pastel shapes, the painted gestures in Abri are less connected to their subjects. Here, the frothy washes of color bear greater resemblance to analog artifacts: unevenly-applied emulsions or chemical stains—imperfections that evidence the handmade. They reside on the picture plane rather than inside of it—interacting with its surface more than its contents—and appear more like darkroom accidents or natural consequences of finicky studio processes than internal parts of the picture.

These analog marks are important not only aesthetically, but because they play on the viewer’s assumptions and inherent trust in the physical. Rivory undoes the sharp perfection of digital image-making in favor of artificial film grain, soft vignettes, muted or black-and-white tones, and rounded corners. The possibility of the fictional landscapes is strengthened—even made believable—by the presence of marks that belong to a photography that feels of the world, has signs of its tangible, physical making. Thus, the notion of fiction runs twofold in Rivory’s work. By collaging images and applying paint to their surface, Rivory moves the works further from straight photographic representation. But by employing marks of analog photography, the work engages a second kind of fiction, rooting the images in the realm of the physical and the handmade. 

Even the documentary photograph presents some degree of fiction and is not the sum of it factual parts. In this regard, even an analog photograph is an altered document. Still, it is less suspicious, certainly, to the average viewer, who is likely aware of the smoothing and waist-whittling Photoshop techniques adopted by slick fashion magazines—and increasingly made user-friendly with apps like FaceTune—but doesn’t necessarily consider the duplicity of “pre-Photoshop” photographs. Because they appear handmade, the instinct is to trust Rivory’s images, despite their dreamlike nature.

It is an oversimplification to characterize the proliferation of digital-analog markings in photography as purely aesthetic—or, for that matter, purely a consequence of nostalgia. Our affinity for the handmade is evidenced by the emergence of do-it-yourself craft culture and the popularity of “shabby chic” furnishings and distressed denim, objects with simulated visible history. Not simply a visual flourish, the digital-analog is a function of the way that we use, and build on, visual languages of the past.

It’s not altogether surprising, then, that as digital technology becomes both more capable and more deeply ingrained in our lives, we would use it to reimagine artifacts of our analog past. Rivory invents a new world by grounding it in an old one—wherein photography is the beginning, but not the end. Digital-analog pictures would not actually be mistaken for their analog referents, for (even) the digitally-born contain artifacts all their own. It is worthwhile to consider the digital-analog on its own merits; useful to picture the world as-is and to imagine what else might be.

This article first appeared in The Fiction Issue.