This is another one of those posts “borrowed” from something I wrote in a discussion somewhere else on the web, in which some folks were debating the relative value of two versions of a photograph, one of which was more or less “straight from the camera,” and the other had been modified in post in a number of the usual ways. Here, with a bit of editing, is my stream of consciousness reply to that thread:
The boundaries are difficult and subjective. The “no alterations” people are denying how photography actually works with the possible (and arguable) exception of certain types of documentary and journalism photography. I know it isn’t news to most reading this, but photography is not an objectively truthful medium. In the end, I’m less interested in some hopeless attempt to literally recreate the subject than I am in what the photograph tells me about the artist behind the camera.
Specifically in landscape photography, an attempt to “reproduce” the objective reality of the original scene by eschewing “manipulation” is going to produce something in almost all cases that is not an honest or accurate recreation of the subject we saw as we made the photograph – even if that is what we were interested in. The nature of the subject and our perception of it is never wholly visual – it is bound up in a web of senses evoked by sound, the movement of air, warmth or cold, and much more. In order to somehow evoke something closer to what we felt when we saw the original subject – and that is what we are interested in, right? – we must strive for something other than a limited pseudo-true visual reproduction.
There are boundaries, but even they are not absolute. For example, many would call the classic landscape photographs more “truthful” than some of today’s color-manipulated images. But what could be less realistic than a black and white photograph? I’ve never been out on a day when it was black and white outside! On the other hand, a photographer who makes a claim to believable portrayal of the subject and then pumps up the contrast and saturates the color into Thomas Kincaid territory is going to encounter some issues about the honesty of his/her work.
G Dan Mitchell Photography
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Thank you Dan and Kurt;
Honesty in discussing the image is important. Certainly as you both point out, if you make a composite image then somewhere in the footnotes of that image this should be discussed. Landscape Pros struggle with this all the time. Sign posts, power lines, stray people and ugly cows (well maybe not the cows) are doctored out of an image if the landscape photographer can’t first change their perspective. Should this be discussed in the image? I don’t know many who believe these items contributed to the image and therefore are not important enough to the image to discuss. How about those composites, bracketing and HDR? Should the landscape photographer disclose that this was composite (even if a single image double processed?) Most folks I follow do indeed believe that important elements of the image were changed, and they do discuss these changes. So here the community seems to have found a somewhat clear boundary. And, clear boundaries are scarce in discussions of art.
Humans need boundaries (rules, structure, whatever)! These “art versus photograph” conversations arise then we humans attempt to apply rules to art. Attend a class on “the rule of thirds” and you will learn a lot of great information on composition. But, try and apply those rules to the photographs you view, and soon you will be staring in awe at a beautiful DuChemin image with the subject and horizon neatly splitting the image in half, both vertically and horizontally (see http://www.pixelatedimage.com/blog/ Jan 2, 2011.) And, you’ll wonder if you wasted time in the class.
Rules serve to teach artists the basics ~ and well beyond the basis; they also help photographers struggling to frame an image just as they help a painter fill his canvas. But these rules work best when they are applied (and broken) looking out through the viewfinder, not while looking back at the final image. Here is an absolute for you; not every piece of art will satisfy everyone who views it. And, some of those who do not feel satisfied with a photograph will try and reverse-engineer the “rules” of art to explain why they don’t like the image. It’s just my opinion, but these rules don’t work that way.
Great discussion!
Steve Loos
Steve, thanks for sharing your post. It is a nice deconstruction of the myth that there is some absolute thing that qualifies as a photograph, and on the other side of some technical boundary only things that do not qualify as photographs – but which may, according to some, qualify as “art” or even “Art,” though often even that term is applied derisively.
The problem, as your deconstruction of the question nicely points out, is that once you go looking for the thing that might be regarded as a “pure” photograph you discover that it really doesn’t exist. (I won’t repeat the argument here, since those who are interested can follow the link and read it directly.)
It is not that I don’t think there are boundaries. I do think there are boundaries. But I am certain (irony intended) that they are not objective or clear but are instead very subjective. This makes finding the answer to the “what is OK?” question a much more subtle and nuanced thing, and it requires the person thinking about this to let go of (wrong) absolute notions and instead think about his/her own biases, the intent of the photographic artist, and whether and how the work is successful or not.
My sense is that it is important to be honest about what you do or don’t do in your photography. If one takes a position that “no manipulation is OK,” then one must be ready to explain how choosing camera position and composition and film and focal length and so on is not “manipulation.” And if the answer is “this is OK but that isn’t,” then one must either claim to be the sole arbiter of what is and is not right in the world (ahem…) or else accept the idea that the boundaries are individual and subjective and, in the end, come down to personal taste rather than, say, moral values.
And this idea that over-manipulated photographs (whatever that concept may mean) degrade into “mere art” is one that folks really, really need to think about a bit. Many of us believe that photographs are art, and we might aspire to have our photographs regarded as art.
Dan
Nice write up Steve. You and Dan bring up the argument that always comes up in this discussion, which is that just because you are making something that is itself no longer real by the nature of freezing time through a lens, etc, that anything is fair game. To me, I have a problem with fundamentally altering the elements that make up the image. Combining two or more photographs taken at different places or times. Painting out unwanted things in the photograph. Making a sunset that wasn’t there. These are fundamentally altering the scene. You weren’t there for a great sunset. That sky wasn’t there when you took the picture. Those are composites. They are digital art, whatever, but in my opinion they are not photographs.
Choice of film and paper and lens and shutter speed and a wide range of color and contrast and black and white conversions are totally fine to still be a photograph in my opinion. But cutting together a sky that wasn’t there is like taking a picture of a wolf at a zoo and claiming it is a wild animal. Such things are totally fine in a commercial setting where you are making things for a client, but to present such things as photographs of landscapes you have seen is to me a fraud. It’s not to say anything about how beautiful the image might be.
To me in one case you are *interpreting* a scene that you have captured. In the other instance you are *creating* a scene that wasn’t there. Get it?
Feel free to disagree. I already know I’m in the minority.
I was so enthralled with a recent discussion on this topic I wrote a short article on the “art vs photography” debate:
(hope links are ok in you blog Dan.) Some folks view art through a set of rules, and for those folks those work. Others use rules to compose a shot, but these rules have nothing to do with their personal vision.
http://steveloosphotography.blogspot.com/p/is-it-life-art-or-photoshop-journey-to.html
Thanks for a great topic!
Steve Loos
I may have a bit more to say about this discussion later, but for now I’ll just add one thought. If I would be unwilling to reveal the use of a post-processing technique or unable to effectively defend it’s use, that would make me think that I was crossing a boundary related to artistic integrity that would give me pause.
If I were to claim that my photographs were completely natural and were not modified or altered in any way from the original scene in any way, yet in reality I made film choices based on color preferences (and not accuracy), chose a printing paper because I liked its warm (or cold) tones, used filters at the time of exposure, did any color correction in the chemical or digital darkroom, dodged and burned, cropped in post, straightened a horizon, created black and white images, chose a paper with different contrast, positioned the camera to avoid including unwanted elements, ever used flash or other artificial lighting, used a reflector, applied make-up to a model, used a lens giving unreal perspective affects, used tilt/shift/rise/fall, etc…
… I would have some serious explaining to do.
Dan
Yeah, I hold my own photography to a different standard. I don’t fundamentally alter the landscapes I shoot. Being there and capturing the landscape is what drives me, not creating the landscape later “in the darkroom.” I want to capture an incredible scene to share. I want to have been there and witnessed something special. If I take an ordinary scene and make it extraordinary (through sunset filters, compositing, whatever), then I’m no longer sharing something I witness. I’m creating something else. That’s fine in and of itself, but it’s not photography in my (increasingly minority) opinion. Interpretation versus creation. That’s the line, to me.
I’ve always been a little amazed at how often this topic comes up and the fervor it can generate. It often seems like it’s a surrogate for the film vs. digital debate, since at least in my experience the argument typically comes down to digital manipulation.
I’m of the opinion that reality stops the moment the shutter clicks. You’ve already changed reality simply through your composition (you’re not showing a full scene, you’re showing a fragment of it), you’ve already changed reality by freezing time, you’ve already changed reality through the way lenses change perspective, compress objects relative to each other, change the clarity of near vs. far objects, etc. A photograph by its very nature, even if you do nothing with it in terms of processing following its capture, is already a subjective presentation of what the photographer saw. And that’s without doing things like adding filters or using “special effects” lenses like fisheyes or tilt/shift lenses.
So, for me, what happens in the darkroom (whether literal or digital) is simply an extension of what already happened when the shutter was activated.
Of course, I do hold journalistic/documentary photography to a different standard, as that does claim to be a representation of a particular moment. It’s still subjective, but it’s at a different level. Beyond some cropping, tone adjustments, etc., I don’t think it’s appropriate for manipulation of the image to occur.
Beyond that, it’s fair game. Sure, there’s a “within reason” measurement that I personally apply and is by its nature highly subjective (I inevitably fall into a Potter Stewart explanation for what constitutes an overly manipulated image). But for commercial work, fine art work, etc., I expect the photographer to be creating an expression or impression of what they witnessed, and I don’t expect “reality,” whatever that may mean.
I draw a huge line at compositing. If you do compositing in your photography, then you are not making photographs – you are making composites, or digital art, or whatever else you want to call it. I know my opinion is not shared by many in the photographic community who would argue that if you can do it in photoshop then it’s fair game. This last weekend I was in Death Valley. I was fortunate enough to actually have some clouds there, which in my experience can be a very difficult thing to come by. If I were to take a photo from a cloudless day and photoshop some clouds in there, is that still a photograph? I think not. To me photography has to be an interpretation of a scene that actually exists. If I put two things together that were not in front of the camera, then that scene didn’t actually exist for me to interpret. I don’t mind subtle color corrections, and especially don’t mind compressing the dynamic range down to manageable levels through graduated neutral density filters or combining two more exposures that were taken *at the same time*. You will not find me adding color that wasn’t there with a filter. You won’t find me adding clouds that were not there digitally. You won’t find me painting out a tree I don’t like. I do all these things professionally for feature films and would not even think for a moment to do them in my photography. To me, it’s just dishonest. I’m not talking about commercial crap you do for a client, I’m talking about fine art landscape photography. Just my 2 cents.
This is something I hear an opinion about every single day – being a photographer and artist, and spending the 9-5s working in an art print shop.
Especially with my chosen field of photography – nature and wildlife photography – everyone has their two cents about what’s “real”.
I think it’s more that people generally have an IDEA about something, to the exclusion of what it REALLY and truly looks like. When they see reality, they won’t actually accept it. At the shop, people didn’t buy landscape prints with true-to-life colours, so we had to over-saturate them!
With wildlife photographs, as soon as people find out that I’ve recently been to Africa, they ask “do you have photos of elephants with their trunks up?” This happens all the time – when there are so many more fascinating behaviours displayed by elephants, than merely sniffing the air! Who came up with the idea that it’s for good luck, anyway? Elephants are amazing in EVERY behaviour they exhibit, and particularly when being social with each other – mother elephants taking care of their calves, adult elephants being friendly and tender with one another, young bulls playing “who’s stronger” with one another, elephant greeting ceremonies, mud-wallowing, watching a matriarch’s behaviour as she leads a herd, the list goes on…
Nevertheless, on my most recent trip to Africa, I tried to photograph elephants with their trunks up, just for those people.
And they are my most contrived and least favourite photographs, so much that I haven’t published them on the website yet.
But people will ask for them.
People will also demand what you haven’t got, and don’t appreciate what you were able to get. Wildlife photography is very much about luck and being in the right place at the right time. I photographed a young pride of lions making a kill one afternoon, and the next day I saw them again, lazily lounging about at sunset, so I was able to get quite close to them. They’d obviously had another successful hunt, weren’t hungry, and were content to let me get quite close. And people ask, “why doesn’t that male have a big mane?” Because I only had one week in that national park, and the only one I saw WITH a big mane, was jealously guarding his half of a zebra from jackals, vultures, crows, and everything else that wanted a piece. Not all lions come with big fluffy manes. That shouldn’t make them any less impressive (or any less dangerous!)
But, people only seem to want to hang lion portraits with big manes, on their walls…
I love telling a story with my images about the real animals I encounter, and the animal encounters that I thought were some of the most exciting, people always have a comment on, and it usually boils out to the fact that they imagined it differently…