In what might be the first “correction” to a picture, recently the New York Times published a correction to a photograph published covering the recent storm damage in Connecticut. The correction is here. I don’t know how long that link will last before it goes behind the paywall, but the NPPA covered the story from the photo point of view here. The word being used is “altered” which is accurate, a flash glare was retouched out, and evidently not a good job was done because some parts of the picture no longer lined up.
In another case, a staff photographer in Toledo was discovered to have “altered” a sports photograph by removing some inconveniently placed legs of another photographer standing in the shot but behind a fence. Initially he sidestepped the issue by saying the published photo was intended only for his portfolio, and not for publication, and the publication was mistaken, however subsequent investigation has shown that in the words of the NPPA, the gentleman was “serial digital manipulator,” (I’m going to leave that alone folks), 79 photographs had been found altered. He has since resigned.
There are a lot of interesting issues here I would like to explore, the least of which is can photographs show the truth? I have to admit I am agnostic on this issue, I tend to say I really don’t know if they do or not. My hero, Gary Winogrand was famous for saying things like all photographs are lies and none of them have any narrative ability at all, but in the same breath he would say that he does have the responsibility to describe accurately;
A picture is about what’s photographed and how that exists in the photograph – so that’s what we’re talking about. What can happen in a frame? Because photographing something changes it. It’s interesting, I don’t have to have any storytelling responsibility to what I’m photographing. I have a responsibility to describe well.
- -
The fact that photographs — they’re mute, they don’t have any narrative ability at all. You know what something looks like, but you don’t know what’s happening, you don’t know whether the hat’s being held or is it being put on her head or taken off her head. From the photograph, you don’t know that. A piece of time and space is well described. But not what is happening.
I think that there isn’t a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability. Any of ‘em. They do not tell stories – they show you what something looks like. To a camera. The minute you relate this thing to what was photographed — it’s a lie. It’s two-dimensional. It’s the illusion of literal description. The thing has to be complete in the frame, whether you have the narrative information or not. It has to be complete in the frame. It’s a picture problem. It’s part of what makes things interesting.
- -
It always fascinates me – it bolloxes my mind, I mean, when people talk about photographs in depth, and what not, you know, when all a photograph does is describe light on surface. That’s all there is. And that’s all we ever know about anybody. You know, what we see. I mean, I think we are our faces and whatever, you know? That’s all there is, is light on surface.
Actually knowing what he meant is another story. Winogrand was famously obtuse about defining what he did, but I believe his words are germane in this case.
In terms of news photographs, I do believe that they have a clear responsibility to describe accurately, as Winogrand says, what is being photographed. I think all the other stuff about the objectivity of the photographer is wishful thinking, no one is objective, and I don’t even think it is particularly useful to try to be. Subjectivity creeps in. But it should be enough, to describe accurately. Which definitely rules out removing telephone poles and such for aesthetic purposes. See, that is the ambition of the photographer speaking, the wish for the pictures to be aesthetically pleasing, or to conform to some notion of what is a “good picture.” This is where Winogrand comes in again, he was very distrustful, or certainly bored with how good pictures look. For him the act of photographing was a process of discovery, a “picture problem” he calls it.
When I’m photographing, I see life. That’s what I deal with. I don’t have pictures in my head. I frame in terms of what I want to include, and naturally, when I want to snap the shutter. And I don’t worry about how the picture’s gonna look – I let that take care of itself. We know too much about how pictures look and should look, and how do you get around making those pictures again and again. It’s one modus operandi. To frame in terms of what you want to have in the picture, not about how – making a nice picture. That, anybody can do.
So do I think Gary would have been the best news photographer ever? It is funny to think about it that way. Really I think this has to do more with the nature of photography itself, and especially the place we are at now, a sort of revolutionary place in the history of photography. Walking around New York, (street-shooting, above) everyone has a camera. And everyone is well trained in the art of making “good” pictures now that we have the instant feedback loop of digital reproduction. And I think the bar has been raised in some slight way, we all have computers and some knowledge of photoshop, or at least awareness of the capacity to alter photographs, and in inclination is to do so. Looking at magazines and advertising, and especially looking at art, the manipulation of photography is the mode, we live in a heavily retouched world. The Jeff Wall exhibit at MOMA prompts everyone to write that photography has become the new painting, and there it is, full circle, photography has become what it eclipsed 150 years ago. And for me, I absolutely hate the way 99% of photography looks right now.
So I get the weight of the responsibility journalism has now as the last standard-bearer of “honest” or un-manipulated or whatever you want to call it-photography. It feels like the sand is running out of the bottom of the hourglass on “straight” photography. I am putting all these adjectives in quotes because there is a stilt to them. But this tension was always there, between the pictorialists and the f64 group for example, and between those who like to say they “make” pictures and those that say they “take” pictures. That latter chestnut make/take is always a good one for photo instructors to haul out, photography obviously needs as much artistic shoring up as it can find, so lets emphasize the hand in the making with this all mechanical machine. Photography’s quixotic relationship with the arts is always underneath everything that we say about it, and even moreso with the advent of digital. At least now we can pine for the “good old days” of the photochemical process, as if it were any less technological and mechanical than a photoelectric process filtered by software. Can we see it now? Photography has always been and will always be a chimera and will change with technology.
This makes an interesting problem for news editors. When we speak about altering a photograph, it presumes that “something” exists to alter. We used to have a physical negative, the actual impression of light on grains of silver. I have written here before about the non-entity of digital photography, in all ways, the photograph is now “data.” And to talk about the veracity of the data with respect to what was photographed is to slip into the ether of mathematics only a few of us can understand. But I can list the ways in which the “data” is not the picture-
- the data is monochrome, color is inferred mathematically by an algorithm
- the sharpness of the photo is created by manipulating the actual values of the data so they are no longer actual
- the tonality of the data is linear, and tonal compressions (which our brains perform for us) are created artificially to match what we perceive
- optical aberrations are corrected mathematically by remapping pixels to new locations
So in other words the color, sharpness, tonality and optical shape of the image exist only in mathematics. And this is only the beginning folks. Researchers now have an idea to make a camera that creates the sharpness after the photograph is taken. I can’t even understand that, let alone explain it!
Do I have a point? We are in for a rocky road. News organizations might want to look at the latest copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 and blacklist any tool or process that they think could cause problems. Craqueleur is definitely OUT. Damn! But might 99% of the rest be also? Photographers have always had tonal, color and contrast controls at a minimum. I have now heard this described with respect to digital as “toning” the RAW file, like it was some warm gold bath we immerse the photo in…sounds very artistic. Dodging and burning sounds so “dodgy” doesn’t it? Then there was the old tilt the easel trick to straighten out verticals on buildings, that worked some of the time. So maybe perspective cropping is ok? And good old cropping is just fine for news pictures but anathema for artists for some reason-”I NEVER crop” is the mantra. I have read that Walker Evans was known to trim his negatives with a guillotine right down to the nub, which made printing them in the enlarger quite a challenge. Don’t like that branch there? WHOP! GONE!
All I can say is that I have a responsibility to describe accurately. Do photographs show the truth? I don’t know. I would not depend on them to do that in any complex situation. I think news readers should expect that what they are seeing is what it looked like though, no more or less, and there is not a whole lot of subjectivity to that description. Winogrand is right here, a picture is the result of what something looked like. To a camera. And increasingly, to a camera whose recording medium is mostly a long chain of software and mathematics.