This post derives from something I wrote elsewhere in a discussion about a photograph that included something that wasn’t originally in the scene, a discussion that became rather polarized.
“Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.”
― Ansel Adams
All photographs lie. But all photographs carry a burden of reality.
Except for photographers who overtly and obviously manipulate reality in major ways as a central concept of their work — see Jerry Uelsmann, for example, or some work by John Paul Caponigro, among others — viewers come to photographs believing that the images had their genesis in the real. Photographers can respond to this basic presumption in photography in a number of ways, and perhaps in landscape photography the response has even more implications.
Let’s say you are Caponigro or Uelsmann and a major point of your photography is to produce visual art that derives from and references the landscape but then combines it with non-landscape elements or takes those elements and fundamentally rearranges them so that they intentionally no longer can be taken to represent the real landscape. These photographers openly embrace and build their work on creating imaginary fantastical worlds out of materials derived from the real landscape, creating what I refer to as “imaginary landscapes.” The photographer and the viewer are on exactly the same page here – both accept and embrace the fantasy and the sometimes more ambiguous line between the real and the imagined. This work seems completely honest and genuine.
On the other hand, let’s say you are a photographer who builds and bases a reputation not on the creation of visual fantasies — things we all know are not and cannot be real — but instead on going to great lengths to travel to “special places,” often telling stories of finding special places and special conditions that less focused and dedicated photographers do not find. Such a photographer might create the impression that it is his or her unusual and special ability to put in the effort to find and go to such places and to find and see the most special moments that make it possible to reveal to us the actual natural beauties of this landscape. In fact, many who might admire such a photographer do so not only because of the abstract beauty of the photographs but very much because of what they are said to represent: special and exceptional real times and places and light and circumstances that exist, but which can only be found and seen by a visionary photographer who managed to be there as a witness.
Here is the question. The question is not whether it is or is not OK to create a composite a photograph out of elements that were not all present in the frame when the photograph was made, but to what extent is such a thing consistent or not with the notions about the specific photographer’s work based on what the photographer would have us believe about it, or even about what the photographer tells us implicitly or explicitly about his/her work?
When Uelsmann or Caponigro insert a person or a cloud or a spectral reflection into an image of real places, doing so is the point and the acknowledged dissonance with “reality” is a major point of the photograph. When a photographer who builds a reputation as a visionary person who sees and experiences and shares a special view of the real does such a thing and explicitly says that it is something else or implicitly goes along with the assumptions of the misled viewers, it is quite a different sort of thing. In my view the former is art and the latter is a problem.
Two final comments:
The question of how far is too far is complicated. This is not a binary where either no manipulation is permitted or where it doesn’t matter when, where, or how one manipulates. The real issues are in the complex middle ground and they are subjective and relative. Nonetheless, these decisions do have significance and consequences.
One of my personal boundaries is that I won’t do something in a photograph that accepts and operates on that presumption of photographic reality unless I would be willing to openly discuss it.
What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment or a question on this page.
Notes:
I’m considering changing the opening quote (“All photographs always lie. But all photographs carry a burden of reality.”) to read: All photographs lie. But all photographs carry a burden of truth. I’ll leave it as is for now, since explaining the implications of the edit might take too many words in this article.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. Author of “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” from Heyday Books — also at Amazon.
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Dishonesty has more to do with the intentions of the photographer, and less to do with the particulars of manipulation.
Good images tell some sort of Truth, whether or not the view exists in Nature or comes from some other place.
Bad art, at least immoral art, tells a Falsehood, even if the source appears to be capturing a “real moment”.
My go-to case is the late painter Thomas Kincade, who took a paltry set of cliched illustrator’s tricks, mastered by Disney studio artists in the ’30s, then hyped his schlock as nostalgic impossible “realism” and made a fortune selling to naive folks hungry for Art but cluelessly naive about how to look at it.
I think that the best photographs clearly communicate a subjective truth seen through the eyes of the photographer — an honest telling of how he/she sees the world. A photograph that is highly “manipulated” can offer powerful subjective truth, and some that are not manipulated much at all can avoid this kind of honesty.
I was drawn to this conversation in relation to the kerfluffle over Steve McCurry and the numerous recent images of his found to have been heavily modified, by digital removal of people and large objects, in what reasonable viewers would perceive to be photojournalistic shots. I see the modified products as no different than the fabrication of fictional characters or stories for ‘factual’ essays. Weakly defending the product as ‘artistic’ does not change our expectation in regard to the apparent veracity of the images, as they otherwise appear in the genre of his famed previous work. National Geographic editors helped create this undermining of credibility with more and more allowances for cosmetic, incidental editing for the sake of elegant layouts and covers, but it has infected the photojournalistic world and in particular younger folks with no grounding in the concept of scrupulous standards.
Working in a certain genre clarifies the criteria by which your work is viewed; photojournalists need to hold to a special standard, and be very clear as to how and when they bend accepted rules. Their job is to record situations to show others clearly, not to express their emotions or propagandize by manipulation. Indelible images have a power that must not be abused.
I don’t think we are that far apart. I agree that context makes a huge difference when it comes to the relationship between photography and its attempts of portray objective reality. Journalism clearly makes a claim to show us what objectively is and to both minimize and clarify the roles of subjectivity on the part of the photographer — to the point that we expect photojournalists to sometimes sacrifice pure visual appeal in order to avoid a loss of truthfulness.
You may have noticed that I used some strange language to make that point. For example, I did not write that photographs “show us the truth” or let us see “what actually happened.” Photography is never — at least not that I can imagine — wholly objective. There is always some subjectivity that reflects the photographer’s way of seeing. The photographer choose to photograph or not photograph certain things because he/she things that not all elements are equally important or equally interesting. (Most are thinking, at least in some deep mental recess, about which images will “work” or “sell.”)
Beyond which photographs are made, how those that are made are contrived will also necessarily incorporate the photographer’s subjectivity: long lens or short? close or far away? how much background to include? fast or slow shutter speed? blur the background with a large aperture or not? where to not cross the line and photograph the unphotographable? And much more.
The issue of subjectivity in photographs is central — both to recognizing that the claims of photography’s truthfulness are often inflated and to recognizing the importance of the quality of the subjective view as a primary differencing factor among photographs.
From what I know of this situation and from what I have seen, while I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with the techniques that McCurry used, I think that there is a problem when his photography implies or outright says that such things are not part of how it is created.
Dan
…”And when it comes to being honest, truthful, and a person of integrity… regarding one’s own personal truths as something that can be compromised, made up, invented, and faked, and made to seem like what they are not seems like an especially sad and debased sort of thing. If one cannot be true to one’s own self, what can one be truthful about? “Here I am, as seen though my photographs. Only not really. I’m lying. I’m actually someone else!””
Very well said, Dan.
“When a piece of writing is presented as fictional, the reader should not treat it as truth. Period.”
Re: Guy Tal’s comments: Just for the record, the opposite of fiction is non-fiction. Fictional writing often presents powerful truths. Just as non-fiction can warp truth in any of several ways and still be considered non-fiction (for example: presenting an exception as the norm, or by omitting certain facts that would impact a reader’s perception differently).
Sorry that this doesn’t address the larger topic, I just wanted to clear up the terminology for the sake of better argument. Thanks for presenting the thought-provoking topic.
Thanks, Craig. Often the point (or at least a point) of fictional literature is to convey truthful things in the most powerful possible way. I had not thought of the parallel in exactly this way, but I think that something quite similar can happen in photography, realizing that it cannot be exactly the same.
It is certainly true that non-fiction writing can also be subjective and typically is, in a way not that different from the way in which a photograph, even one that attempts to be representational, always incorporates a point of view.
Dan
There is a very vocal and powerful majority who promote the idea that photography is a single category, to be evaluated and judged by a single set of criteria, which they often characterize as “reality” or “truth.” Ironically, these people themselves are perpetuating a lie, since photography is not, and never was, a medium strictly intended for, or entirely capable of, the representation of reality.
I think that a better way to judge photographic images is by their creator’s intent – the perception they want to create in their audience – and in how they present their images – whether as evidentiary or creative.
When an image is presented as creative/artistic, the viewer should know to suspend disbelief, same as if they were reading a novel or seeing a play. This is not a gray area, it’s a very clear binary distinction. To demand that all photographs be shackled by the constraints of the “as-seen” view is as silly as to demand that all writing must describe things that are factually correct. It is a draconian limitation to the expressive powers of the medium. When a piece of writing is presented as fictional, the reader should not treat it as truth. Period. There is nothing inherently right or wrong with it, it just has a different intent than, say, a news report, and should be treated differently.
A great example I saw online today is an image of a waterfall in a slot canyon, which looked very peaceful and likely rendered very close to what anyone else would have seen, but the photographer also described having to stand in line(!) to “get the (same) shot (as everyone else),” meaning that the impression the image conveys is not at all representative of the actual experience. The photographer could have claimed that the image is a representation of reality (to his credit, he did not), but to me that would have been a much more sinister form of manipulation than anything done to alter the original capture.
My point is that in order to make a proper judgment, the metric of physical manipulation of the image is a poor one and ultimately not useful for either the viewer or the photographer. It is much better if viewers are educated to apply different evaluation criteria when viewing images made with different intents.
I love analogies for the ways that they can often cut to the chase, and I like this one a lot: “To demand that all photographs be shackled by the constraints of the “as-seen” view is as silly as to demand that all writing must describe things that are factually correct.”
Truth and photography is a very interesting and important subject, but there are a lot of monumentally naive ideas (in my view) about this that get too often accepted as received truths. I won’t list them since I know you are already sufficient aware of what might be on that list.
Part of this is related to that “burden” I mentioned in the first paragraph of my post. (I also offered a slight revision in a note at the post’s ending.) Because of the technical nature of what photographic equipment does, and how that was regarded in many ways as being different from what, say, a painting was thought to do in the 1800s, photography cannot really escape its fundamental connection with the purported real, the stuff of which it is constructed. This affects how photographs are regarded, both in good ways and in those unfortunate ways that we often encounter.
So photographs do not, in my view, do a very good job of rendering objective truths about the physical world. They are perhaps as good as many other tools for that, but for many of us that is not at all what photographs aspire to do.
What photographs can do, I believe, is be a vehicle for artists to share their truth — their personal and idiosyncratic ways of seeing and making sense of the world and our their experience in it. This requires a kind of honesty that is more complex and, I think, more sophisticated — and far more interesting! — than attempted to show me that a rock looks like a rock. It shows me what the rocks looks like to you, how your relate it to other things in your experience and our shared experience, how I might see the rock in ways I might otherwise not have known.
Great photographs tell us more about the photographer than about the things in front of the camera.
“…all photographs are self-portraits.” – Minor White
And when it comes to being honest, truthful, and a person of integrity… regarding one’s own personal truths as something that can be compromised, made up, invented, and faked, and made to seem like what they are not seems like an especially sad and debased sort of thing. If one cannot be true to one’s own self, what can one be truthful about? “Here I am, as seen though my photographs. Only not really. I’m lying. I’m actually someone else!”
Take care,
Dan
The question of composites in photography is a difficult one once you step past the basics. I was involved in the rewriting of the rules for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year a couple of years ago and the question of composites came up. The answer was difficult as we wanted to allow focus blending (for microscopy reasons mainly) and also stitching (for resolution and field of view) and exposure blending. However, some photographers had submitted photos that were blended where a single frame had been included from an hour or so later. That submission then raised the question of how long between images can we allow? Fortunately the competition staff agreed that explicit rules were going to be so arbitrary that we ended up giving guidelines and with the statement that the photograph “should not deceive the viewer of the implicit truth of the subject”. This allowed intentional camera movement and multiple exposures (radical manipulations but not intended to deceive) and also minor cloning (which many underwater photographers do to remove ‘floaters’.
Now obviously WPOTY is intended to be based on fact and so has a correlation with non-fiction writing where the photograph is being presented as ‘fact’ not ‘fiction’.
The problem is that we have fiction and non-fiction areas in book stores. We’re sadly lacking that in photography and hence the confusion (imagine mixing the alternative history fiction category in with the non-fiction books!)
I like your statement: “Would not deceive the view of the implicit truth of the subject.”
I think that part of the problem is that we (generally speaking, among photographers as a larger group) do not often enough think about the real nature of what we do. On one side there are those who imagine that the purpose of photography is to render objectively accurate images of things, but those who recognize the evidentiary nature of some photography should understand the limits and the shortcomings of photography in that regard. On the other side are those who adopt that “I can do anything I want and it is all good” point of view. Actually, the can do anything they want, but there are consequences — and it seems naive for a photographer to imagine that it is purely a matter of “I can say what I want in a photograph,” while then objecting when others have a response to the photograph and say so.
These days I can certainly understand the challenges that all of this presents for wildlife photography, something I do a bit of myself. Viewers believe (with only slight stretching of this trust) that what they see in wildlife photographs represents things really seen in the natural world. And not only that, but that the most skillful photographers, though skill and patience and vision and hard work, are able to bring back extraordinary images of such subjects. These are the things that most viewers trust. Yet, today there are so many ways in which this trust can be violated: photographing captive animals, compositing, wildly manipulative post-processing, and more. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these techniques in the photographic arsenal — the problem is more about where and how and when they are applied, and to what purpose.
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your perspective, Tim.
Dan
On this subject, there is this…
and there is this…
:-)
It all comes down to purpose. If a photograph is created as a piece of art for art sake, there are no boundaries. If it is on the other hand presented as a document of fact or science, then any alteration should be noted. Most all of our photographic gods of the black and white, that we hold so dear, did some pretty serious manipulation of their images in the development of both the negative and print. I have witnessed great photographers adding leaves to a scene, (you know who you are) is that a crime? The shot was real, but the scene was manipulated.
Manipulation happens at many levels, is there a difference in removing a gum wrapper from the scene by hand or digitally? We may bend a branch out of the way by hand, but is removing it in Photoshop a crime?How about a telephone wire, or even pole, is that crossing the line. The pesky National Park Service Rangers get pretty angry when I include a chain saw in my camera bag.
I see no problem with someone removing any distractions from a scene digitally, as long as in doing so, they don’t replace it with something that is not there. Our brain does it to the scene when we see it in person, why not make it that way. I guess that is the point of what I try to achieve, which is “what did it look like or feel like to me when I was there”.
I am often more bothered by the manipulation of the saturation slider than anything else
What it comes down to is telling the truth, if someone adds clouds, a tree, or bolt of lightning, they should say so. If they just did a few things to help clarify the image and did not alter what was there, I see no problem. I tend to view landscape photographs as art, rather than documents of fact. Everything we do, from the selection of lens and choice of aperture is a manipulation of the scene.
But yes, it does bug the heck out of me when people make claims that they got that photograph by being at that secret spot at the exact right moment, when it is obviously a Photoshop Special.
Sven: For me it is also about the honesty and integrity of the expression of the photographer — not at all about the specific techniques used. I’m happy (and even quite impressed, on a number of levels) when Uelsmann creates a photograph that is explicitly not the “real” objective landscape in his attempt to portray accurately and honestly his own subjective notions of internal landscape. I’m not happy and not impressed (at least not in a positive way) when [unnamed photographer] uses essentially the same sorts of techniques to create an equally unreal and impossible thing and then explicitly claims or clearly implies that [unnamed photographer] is sharing with us a special and extraordinary example of what [unnamed photographer] found in the real world by dint of [unnamed photographer’s] astonishing vision and tremendous efforts.
The former has complete integrity. The latter traffics in overt lies.
In my world, fundamental and critical components of art are honesty and integrity. It is what it is.
Dan