Digital Manipulation - How Much is Too Much

'The camera never lies' goes the adage, and for a long time we almost believed it.

While photographs could never lay claim to being entirely truthful, there was a sense that an image recorded on film was as close as we could get to a freeze-frame of real life. Photography has long been seen as way of expressing the poetry and finding the meaning, some might call it truth even, in the reality that surrounds us.

It's not that film photography was ever completely free of visual trickery. Think Man Ray or the Russian propagandist Rodchenko. But it was rarer, if only because convincing transformations were more difficult to achieve. Most film-based photographers, especially photojournalists, confined themselves to adjustments that could be made in the darkroom - tweaks in contrast, tone or saturation.

With the advent of digital technology, however, image manipulation became easy. Mere configurations of ones and zeros, photographs are now infinitely malleable. Data, unlike a chemical reaction to light, is simple to re-arrange. A click here and a click there, a careful selection of this or that, a well placed cut and paste and within seconds a picture can be transformed.

As it has become easier to manipulate photos, so the credibility of the photographic image as a faithful representation of reality, and the camera as a purveyor of 'truth', have waned.

Armed with tools like Photoshop, it is easy for photographers to get carried away. Who, after all, can resist the allure of making a good picture look even better.

Wouldn't my picture look so much nicer without those electricity pylons in the way? And what if that ugly cardboard box were to disappear from my otherwise idyllic rural scene? Even if the cardboard box was there when I took the picture, it's not as if it really belongs there.

These are just some of the justifications photographers may make to themselves before re-arranging their pictures with the aid of some digital wizardry.

So just how much manipulation is too much? Where does the invisible frontier lie before photography, stripped of its credibility, sinks into the digital oblivion of irrelevance?

One answer is surely that the dividing line is more moral and ethical than technical. If you claim a photograph is an honest representation of reality, meaning you're categorising it as editorial (or informational), then it would clearly be dishonest to manipulate the image so that it looked real without faithfully portraying what was actually recorded at the moment you pressed the shutter.

The case of landscape photographer David Byrne (see his photo above) is an interesting one. He was recently disqualified from the UK's Landscape Photographer of the Year 2012 competition because the Photoshop work on his winning pictures was found to have broken contest rules. It was revealed that Byrne had added clouds and cloned out certain physical details of his image. (Read more about Byrne's disqualification "here")

Interestingly the competition organiser, Charlie Waite, didn't accuse Byrne of trying to cheat but rather of inadvertently breaking the rules. For his part Byrne asserts that he hadn't read the rules properly noting that "I don't think what I have done to the photo is wrong in any way."

"I have never passed off my photographs as record shots and the only reason this has come about has been due to my openness about how and what I do to my images. The changes I made were not major and if you go to the locations you will see everything is there as presented," he continued.

The issue relates partly to expectations. Is the viewer expecting the image to describe reality? Or is the purpose of the image, which is nothing more than a two dimensional representation, to illicit a response from the viewer at an emotional level, to create an understanding or to intimate a meaning much as any work of art might do?

If the photograph is art what does it matter that a cloud looks a little different? The clouds look different every day, every second of the day even. What does it matter that a small physical element might have disappeared from an image if that element does not change the essential meaning of the image? Are we being mislead or deceived by such changes?

After all, when Magritte painted a realistic representation of a pipe and wrote under it "this is not a pipe" (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), was he not reminding us that all images are 'unreal'? That we are perhaps being best deceived by images which look most real because we are most tempted to believe them.

Byrne seems to argue that though he broke the rules of the competition he entered, his work does not try and present reality exactly as we might see it with our own eyes. The very fact his images are shot in black and white using HDR techniques gives them an appearance which sets them apart from reality. So perhaps it is only a small and harmless step to start removing clouds and other physical elements that were present at the time he took the original picture.

The problem here is that once you start down that particular metaphorical road where do you stop? And once the process has begun whereby all photos are mere starting points for digital manipulation, then what credibility can the photograph have as a tool of witness - which has, after all, been its primary function for photojournalists.

Perhaps what matters most is context and intention. Digital manipulation is fine when the context in which it is taking place is self evident. We don't expect commercial images to be truthful - so go ahead and manipulate them. Their purpose is to manufacture message, not to report. And when a picture is purely art, then surely digital manipulation is no more deceitful than the whims of an artists brush. Art is not about reality or, more precisely, not about reproducing it faithfully.

Where digital manipulation seems most harmful is when it is applied to photographs whose sole claim to credibility is the truthfulness of their representation. Photographs that purport to describe reality, that bear witness, that report, must be built around truthfulness.

This does not mean to say that they should not be artful or poetic, nor that they should aim for hum drum neutrality by being purely literal. Even journalistic and editorial photography comes with a point of view - as all photographs must. If the credibility of photography as a means of reporting is to be preserved, however, strict limits must be placed on the use of digital manipulation techniques.

A good rule of thumb is to compare the manipulation of an image to what might have been achieved through normal darkroom techniques - lightening, darkening, increasing contrast etc.

Of course the clouds in a darkened photograph might not have actually looked like that, and may have been darkened expressly to produce an effect. But at least the viewer should be assured that those clouds were recorded by the photographer along with every other physical element before the lens at the moment the shutter was pressed.

There is an ethical and moral core of truthfulness to this approach which must be maintained if the credibility of editorial photography is to be sustained. While photographers like David Byrne may choose to remove clouds or other elements from their photographs for the sake of their art, it is essential that they be truthful about their approach. If not, the saying that "camera never lies" will be as devoid of truth as the photographs that march before our eyes each day.

Following are some links which highlight some of the issues relating to digital manipulation:

"L.A Times Photographer Alters Iraq Images"
"Some Famous Altered Images"

Photojournalism is Dead! Long Live Photojournalism!

By Yvan Cohen

Archive picture from the American Civil War...

Depending on who you talk to the diagnosis will vary. Some will tell you photojournalism is dead. Others will argue that, on the contrary, photojournalism is alive and kicking and perhaps healthier than ever.

So what’s it to be? Dead or alive? What is the state of photojournalism today?

The truth of course lies somewhere between these extremes. With the advent of digital technology and the universal means to create and disseminate photographs (read smart phones), photojournalism, or at least the role of photojournalists as a distinct group within society, has changed.

In many ways, and for obvious reasons, the story of photography, like cinema, has been defined by technology. When the technology changes, so does the art.

Though the roots of photojournalism reach back to the earliest cameras, it was the creation of the first portable cameras in the mid 1920s which generated the momentum for photography and journalism to merge, thereby sparking a revolution in photographic communication and spawning an entire generation of photojournalists.
 
Fittingly Leica was first into the fray with the release of its Leica 1 in 1925. As more hand held cameras arrived on the market, it wasn’t long before photographers began recording every detail of daily life, spontaneously capturing ‘moments’and giving them new meaning – to borrow a turn of phrase Henri Cartier-Bresson so famously made his own.

Photojournalists soon began publishing images taken in the heat of the action. Robert Capa’s picture of a soldier being struck by a bullet in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 is perhaps the most striking early example of how photojournalism had begun capturing ‘moments’ in extremis; changing people’s understanding of conflict and of the world they lived in.

Portable though they may have been, early 35mm cameras and film were still well beyond the means of the ‘everyman’. The first generation of photojournalists was, for the most part, an exclusive club of well-to-do adventurers who combined photographic art with a desire to communicate the reality of the world they encountered, both at home and abroad. Theirs was a new visual language, a new medium for describing and explaining current events, culture and history.

As the appeal of photography broadened and as the images of photojournalists became the staple of magazines and newspapers, the demand for images describing events as they were happening intensified. In these early days demand for fresh imagery quickly outstripped supply and photojournalism as a profession was born.

For some 75 years the 35mm film camera, in the many forms it was to take, became the workhorse of modern photography. Cameras in general became cheaper too so that, at least in the wealthier nations of the developed world, it became common for every family to own one. Meanwhile the ranks of the world’s photojournalists swelled as, cameras slung over their shoulders, they fanned out across the planet in search of ‘truthful’ pictures that would deepen our understanding of ourselves, and perhaps encourage us to avoid some of the most painful lessons of history.

For many photojournalists the unspoken credo was that photography by virtue of its immediacy and its innate truthfulness, and if wielded by professionals endowed with skill and ethics, had the power to move people and even bring about fundamental change.

During these ‘golden’ decades there emerged a growing pantheon of photographs that seared themselves into the public consciousness. Nick Ut’s image of a young girl, victim of a napalm attack in Vietnam, fleeing naked along a road in Vietnam comes to mind. Or of stick like human figures crawling across a barren landscape in famine-struck Ethiopia.

Modern photojournalism seemed to reach its apogee in the gritty and often terrifyingly raw photojournalistic coverage of the Vietnam war. Many of the mainly black and white photographs of the Vietnam war have become iconic and central to our understanding of what it means to fight a war. Photographic coverage of the Vietnam war, perhaps more than any other, cemented the role of photojournalism as a vital tool of communication and of the photojournalist as an essential witness to world history.

The ‘organic’ nature of analogue film lent photographs an authenticity and credibility they were later to lose with the advent of more malleable digital images. Indeed, much of the weight of photojournalistic testimony was drawn from the adage ‘the camera never lies’.

The fragile nature of film, combined with the way in which it records images by responding to precise doses of light meant it was also a medium that required mastery, thereby creating a natural barrier to casual amateurs. Since you could only know if film had been properly exposed hours and sometimes days after a picture was actually taken, it was often all but impossible to correct errors in the field. This made it even more imperative for editors and picture buyers to rely on trained professionals whose mastery of the medium could guarantee their pictures would be publishable.

Digital technology changed everything. It was a seismic technological shift that has re-shaped the world of photojournalism, much as the invention of portable cameras did from the late 1920s onwards.

In the digital age pictures are no longer the manifestations of a mysterious permanent-seeming chemical reaction but of a mind-boggling mosaic of raw data whose form is determined by light falling on a sensor and whose ‘reality’ can be re-arranged with a few clicks. Mastery of film has thus become an obsolete skill.

The technological, economic and skill barriers that once kept the masses out of photography, or of photojournalism at least, have now definitively fallen.

The relative exclusivity once enjoyed by professional photojournalists has all but disintegrated and the hordes, toting digital cameras in every shape and form, have come rushing in. The falling cost of digital technology and the ease with which pictures can be correctly exposed and focused means anyone can take a usable, publishable picture.

Most importantly, the camera in its broadest sense has evolved from being a specialised tool designed for a specific and unique purpose to become merely one function among others on the digital devices that accessorize our lives. The camera, or the means to record images, has become as commonplace as the ballpoint pen: almost everybody has one in their pocket.

As pictures have become cheaper and easier to produce, and as they have become easier to share online, so their value has naturally eroded. It’s simple economics. The supply of photos available to picture editors and publishers has exploded. Demand meanwhile – at least from professional media outlets – has not kept pace. So prices have fallen, pushing many photojournalists who relied on license fees from traditional media outlets into hard times.

The tsunami of digital imagery that has flooded our lives, inhabiting every nook and cranny of our consciousness, depicting everything from the most banal reality to the most dramatic news events, has changed our perception of photographs too. Digital images, like all forms of information, have become as universal and as instantly available as the air we breathe. As a result, the unique aura of the photograph has been devalued and its impact diminished.

The digital revolution – as it should be known – has quite simply made it harder to create photographs that will move people, even change their understanding of the world, in ways that once were possible. The sheer volume of images to which people are exposed has numbed their senses. Constant exposure to raw visual information – both still and moving images – from every war and disaster as they unfold is having the perverse effect of making us more aware yet less sensitive.

When it becomes harder to change the world through photography, the value of the photojournalist’s vocation is called into question. When it becomes harder to earn a decent living by publishing photojournalistic stories and imagery, the very profession does seem threatened, at least in the form we have known till now.

Of course this does not mean that photojournalism is dead. Rather it is changing. The universalization of the means to create and distribute digital photographs has democratized the world of photojournalism, opening the field to almost everyone with a camera, with an ‘eye’ and an internet connection. In such a crowded context and in a world drowning in images, the challenge for the dedicated photojournalist to touch viewers through original, creative, honest and visually moving reporting has become greater than ever before. The bar has been raised.

The multiplication of outlets while crowding the picture market and creating a glut of supply also means a multiplication of opportunities. For those with the energy, dedication and talent to push their way to top of the pile the rewards of recognition remain…and with recognition will come the ability to earn a living, of sorts.

Photojournalism is and has always been about communicating so while many of the old channels of communication – like the traditional broadsheets and news weeklies – may be fading, new channels are rising, such as social media and a plethora of online media platforms.

Photojournalists living and working in this new reality must adapt if they are to survive. To be sure, photojournalism is far from dead, but it has changed almost beyond recognition. The challenge for the photojournalists of today is to change with the times, to swim with the tide of technology as photography has always done.