No two objects have meant as much to visual culture of late as the widespread use (and piracy) of Adobe Photoshop and the availability of digital cameras. It is no wonder, then, that the stock photography business is booming. And should we be surprised that Bill Gates presciently entered this business long ago? His stock company Corbis is the number two player in the industry.

The creation and manipulation of images remains one of the simple pleasures of computer ownership for a great many. It is also the secret weapon of the blogosphere. From Perez, et al.:

Skipping ahead to business class, I’ll note that the same image creation tools in the hands of professionals can take on wide-ranging and even sublime implications. Witness Shepard Fairey‘s entry into the most captivating narrative in a generation [1]:

The middling photographer in all of us lives and dies in the paintbrush and rubber stamp, the eraser and the magic wand tools in Photoshop. Somewhere around there I had the idea of creating a desktop calendar. It was, for me, a purely functional idea. Being able to visualize the coming weeks gives the processing of time a much-needed physical component that helps prevent it from getting lost in the mind haze of Life in the Big City. That’s the theory anyway. The down-side of doing so publicly, I realized only later, is that I’d have to create a new one every three months. With that, I present desedo’s 2nd quarter desktop calendar — available here at our free store. [2]

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1. Speaking of Fairey, many skateboarders have become paragons of outsider culture, not as many are invited to lecture the creative world via the PSFK conference.
2. The four photographs in this post comprise the pixel space from which the calendar was wrought. Out of Many, One.

Oh, and take that Photoshop!