THE VIEW FROM HERE
by Stephen Johnson

Perspectives on Contemporary Notions of Photography and Truth

Another controversy has arisen over truth in photography, prompted by image manipulations disqualifying some entries into the World Press Photographers contest. Some of the negative reactions to the disqualifications characterized all photographs as "lies anyway," and suggested the judges get a "little more modern." I've heard this "photographs are lies" assertion often in the last few years, almost always in defense of non-disclosed manipulations of images purported to be realistic. This prompted me to sit down and reflect on the subject once again.

It has become a modern truism that photographs are lies. Many are, most are not. By the billions, photographs are not lies, even if merely snapshots from our cell phones. They are visual records of what was before the lens. Some are manipulated into being other things, through Instagram, Photoshop or dozens of photo editing software packages in between. But for the most part, the photographs in our lives are straight, un-manipulated by intention, a record of the scene that we want to preserve.

Photography can be about so many different things, performance, fantasy, fashion, as a starting point for so many visual media expressions. It is a splendid wide range of possibility for communication, art, documentation, fine arts of all kinds, journalism, personal history. Fashion is probably the most notable of the common photo-editing distortions, but we see it too often in journalism, and all of the time in nature photography. I believe huge damage is done to women's self-image and male expectations with our perfect skinny large breasted female iconography via Photoshop.

Magazine Ad for a Portrait Software. 2013.

Photography can be a powerful truth-telling medium when we choose to use it that way. Even in abstraction, the power is in the underlying reality we work to understand. As an educator, I encourage abstraction, ambiguity of scale, unusual points of view and perspectives to stir the viewer up, knock us off our normal expectations. It is often those characteristics that engage our imaginations.

A Simple Reality
A photograph is made when a light capturing tool is pointed toward a scene and the light energy is captured as light and dark values. It is a simple thing, as humans we desire to hold a scene we see, we compose and frame that scene within the camera's view, and we trip a capture switch. It is a simple truth, the light that passed through the lens, makes a 2d image of the scene. It is a simple truth, these are the light and dark values before the lens. It is an objective recording of that light.

Photoshop has nothing to do with this process.

Truth, Editing and Lying
Ansel Adams is often quoted as saying that "cameras don't lie, photographers do." Photographers, by definition, are carefully selecting what they want to include, just like any recorder of experience. It is certainly not a picture of where the camera was not pointing, any more than a truthful telling of a news event that doesn't interview the person standing next to the person with the story and inquire about their breakfast. The reporter is interviewing someone about a story, adding their own reporting experience. Reporting is not telling the entire collected possible observations from the scene, but the the views and information illustrating the story. A simple photograph may be among the greatest truth tellers we have. It is truth limited by the camera frame and captured at a moment of choice by the photographer. It is always a limited truth, but all truths are, they are never all encompassing.

Photoshop can be a powerful tool for distortion and light lying. For me though, Photoshop enables the opposite of that distortion. Photoshop is a tool for processing that photographic truth into a finely tuned story, similar to a writer who would carefully choose and edit their words into a well written story. Of course a photograph, being a somewhat objective recorder of what was before the lens, may contain all sorts of information the writer would leave out. That's what makes a photographer's job hard, distilling the scene down to only what they intend to record, when they actually make the recording. The very nature of what a photograph is, hasn't allowed the editing of an image as you would fine tune a paragraph, until now. That is the quandary we now find ourselves in, because a photograph is still understood to be the recording of a scene. Once real information is removed from the scene after the fact, the photograph is then a doctored image and loses the deep power its truth telling ability can bring. This is clearly true in photojournalism, but I believe it is true of any photo that presents the image as real.

Oscar Rejlander The Two Ways of Life, 1857.
Combination Print - 30 Negatives

Photo-manipulation has been with us for most of photography's 176 years, since the earliest days of photography. Early on, photography was more about magic than truth. With the widespread interest in personal and family portraits, it certainly became a mixture of record, performance, documents, and after-the-fact alterations. The popularity of the tintype became an obvious demonstration of people's desire for that "record" of the image of loved ones. It only took a few years for photography's documentation powers to become clear. Photographs from the Crimean War in the 1850s and our own Civil War in the 1860s began to impact our impressions of war. But it was still often seen as illustration as well as document. This was related to the fact that photographs could not yet be printed into books and newspapers, needing illustrators to re-interpret them into printable line-art engravings, often leading to great artistic license. Somehow through all of that, we began to believe in photographs as evidence of events that happened. We've also generally known that photographs can be altered, whether for political intent for Stalin, or perhaps a photographer who really liked one sky and kept printing it into multiple landscapes. A great exhibition Faking it: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop was mounted at New York city's Metropolitan Museum of Art in late 2012.

Manipulation can certainly take place in camera, all sort of ill intentions can be brought to bear right up front. Objects in the scene that were found can be moved, real objects can be arranged to deceive, even bodies, but that is the photographer lying, not the camera.

Timothy O'Sullivan (now attributed). Moved Dead Confederate Soldier in the Devil’s Den,
Gettysburg. 1863.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division: LC-B8171-7942
The moved soldier controversy mentioned in the LOC site. and at Hoaxs.org

Like any truth, we must have confidence in the story teller to believe the story. Our confidence has been shaken in many trusted story tellers. It is an understatement to say that our confidence in the truth of a photograph has been shaken. It has virtually been annihilated. And for good reason, given the history of photography, and modern manipulation. Nonetheless we still believe in photographs. We make photographs because of their truth. We want to witness wonderful scenes because we want to remember and believe the scene existed. We appreciate a photograph often because we believe it shows us what was there.

Straight with Your Audience
Thus a huge weight of responsibility now rests with the photographer in this digital age of easy manipulation, enhancement, and photographic lying. I would suggest we at least try to adopt a way of describing a photograph so that we can let the viewer know what they are seeing. Even if fine art, if the work depicts a scene that appears to be real, a description could clarify it as fiction or commentary when appropriate. If the photograph is presented as a photograph, a rendering "written in light," perhaps we should leave the content alone and keep exaggeration out of it. If the image is meant to use photography for painterly-like impression, compositions or fantasies, would it be that hard given where we are at, to help the viewer understand what they are seeing.

We often hear that in the processing of the photograph, even in the routine interpretation of a now conventional "raw" file, there is such great distance from the captured scene as to make terms like truth seem naive or simply un-informed. It is true that we have to process our limited ability cameras into a finished photograph, very similarly to developing a film negative. But today it is so much more than that with abilities to tune color, tone, brightness relationship and geometry. If we aspire to realism, that can require a lot of work. Cameras do not record with the versatility and adaptability of our eyes and mind as we encode the real world around us. We must process the data to get the most out of cameras, and to chase our visual experience of the world. That is expected and understood by most people.

My objection to current and growing practices may have to do with the degree of the processing and deception as much as anything. I want photographs that appear to be real, to actually be realistic representations, or if not, to inform the viewer that they are actually looking at something else. The heavily manipulated enhanced image may be delightful, but I think some distinctions should be made. I've attempted to find words to describe something so over the top that despite its beginning as a photograph, it might now bear little resemblance to the scene. I've suggested pixel-graph as a naming option, which has been greeted with very little enthusiasm.

As a landscape photographer I have a very deep ethic about not adding or removing real objects within a scene. Nor am I comfortable with an "enhancement" that creates an overt unreality like heavy saturation or extraterrestrial HDR. There is plenty of desire for fiction and fantasy, but I think there is also value in letting people know what they are looking at. We have fiction and non-fiction in literature, we could strive for something similar. Those interested in embellishing their so called non-fiction with dramatic "enhancement" could perhaps consider informing their viewers of the nature of the "changes." Better yet, in my opinion, consider that there may be real value in depicting this beautiful world for what it is, not for what it can be pumped-up into being.

We have always had fiction in photography. With Photoshop our fictions became ever more indistinguishable from non-fiction. That is problematic. I realize there are mud gray areas everywhere here, and I am quite clear that I am making value judgments, but the recent controversy over Press photographs point to a need for further discussion. I hope this column makes a a contribution.

I often tell the story of standing next to the Grand Canyon on a hazy day where I witnessed some visitors get out of a tour bus, remark on how the scene just doesn't look like the postcards, and walk off disappointed. I'm sure they went off and bought some postcards having come to witness the exaggerations rather than the real canyon. And yes, they might have needed some sensitivity training to appreciate the nuances of the real world. But as more and more pressure is put on our national parks, I think it is critical to build constituencies for the real places, not transformed fantasies that the real places cannot live up to. It's bit like on-line dating, showing a potential acquaintance a photo that is a souped-up younger skin, plasticized version of you, doesn't help much on actually meeting.

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