How real can a photograph be?
“BUT long before this stage of conscious manipulation has been begun, faking has already set in….In fact, every photograph is a fake from start to finish.”
Eduard Steichen, Camera Work 1, 1903
Since the invention chemical photography in 1839, the photograph is regarded by many as an objective representation of the world. To the uninitiated, a photograph only becomes “fake” if a shape within a composition has been distorted, or an element has been added or removed. “Photoshopped” we often call it. However, as we are about to discover, manipulations can be even more subtle, and begin even before the shutter button is pressed.
Subject, location, lighting, wardrobe, composition. All controlled. When the shutter was released, this was all reality.
Subject selection
As people, we are only in one place at one time. Cameras, they only point at what a person is looking at. Forget about the cropping of an existing image, we crop the world around us as we raise a camera to our eyes. The subject of every image is a result of our personal interests, the stimulation of our senses, and some ratio of self-satisfaction vs. public acceptance. By choosing a subject, we’ve made a decision to exclude infinite alternatives. Decisions are made about how to use light, how to alter the environment on a scale from candid photography to fully a controlled studio shoot.
Images are not reality - they are merely our reality.
Film or digital Capture
Your reality is now captured on some sort of light-sensitive media; light has burned into the film, or is converted into a number via a pixel. A blue sky hue is now represented by the hue of a chemical or a RGB value that has been designed by an engineer to either closely reproduce the hue, or shift the hue slightly giving the media a characteristic “look”. The same can be said for contrast, saturation and luminance.
The important point here is that the image is the result of an engineer’s work, and they’ve never seen the images. If you’ve ever caught yourself using the phrase “straight from camera”, then we can translate that to “I let a skilled chemical/software engineer process my image for me”. Nothing inherently wrong with that (for example people love the “Portra” look), but it is an intentional decision never the less.
Altering a photograph to your own preference is no different to accepting the results straight from the camera. And its interesting to note that a film negative scan by definition is a digital image. There’s now two adjustments (an analog and a digital) forced on the image, from people you’ve never met.
Editing (culling)
“Editing” in a literal sense is the selection of images from a master set. Another type of cropping, this time of the number of images we show.
We might have taken portraits of a happy person, but we only show the one picture where they look sad. An image of a stormy landscape is interesting precisely because it doesn’t happen very often, and the sunny day versions of the scene are less likely to be published. Editing is deciding on the narrative we wish to portray. Reality through selection. Reality affected by critique.
The best photographers only show images that they believe represent their best contributions. If they showed you all their images it would water down your opinion of them, their message and their legacy. We all do this to some degree with personal pictures on social media.
Global processing
We can do many things to a whole image at once. Correcting exposure. Smoothing. Sharpening. Contrast. Colour correction. Perspective corrections. Cropping. All these things begin with the film/camera engineer’s interpretation of your image, and likely further modified by the image-taker. In previous eras, photographers considered the darkroom interpretation of an image as important as the decisions made at the time of capture. A decision not to work on an image is still a decision.
Printing further affects an image in the way the paper is toned or textured, and they way it can affect shadows and colours. Even displaying a digital image on a screen affects its “look” - the whites on your computer screen are almost certainly warmer or cooler than those on mine.
Architectural photographers often correct converging vertical lines cased by the perspective of looking up at tall buildings. Making the sides of buildings parallel in this manner makes it look more like a schematic. But the reality of perspective is gone. The reality of geometry has been chosen instead.
Reverse perspective shows an object from multiple viewer positions, as if we were were walking past it. Note how the vanishing point is towards the viewer! This is the reality of movement, but has to be composited from multiple images.
Local processing
“Photoshopping” is a phrase used to describe an altered photograph, though it is not just a digital phenomenon - it has been happening since photography was invented. This sort of manipulation is in the realm of the graphic design, but still a tool of the average photographer.
When corrections are applied to only a portion of an image, we are into true “Photoshop” territory. These can be local versions of the ”global” corrections, but often include warping, skin smoothing, compositing (see the example image above), and spot removal.
There is nothing new under the sun, and all the techniques listed above were available to the darkroom photographer too. Looking through a Bill Brandt book, I saw halos of light around buildings and very dark areas in places that you would expect to be lit given the conditions. I think he totally “photoshopped” his work. But his desire was to give a feeling, an emotion, that a flat untouched image would fail to provide.
This exceptional TedX talk by Scott Kelby (who is quite wise and inspiring unless interacting with his co-hosts) really hits on an important point; a picture is only visual and only one instant in time. It omits important elements of a moment like conversation, personality, smells, the work leading to the image. All we have is a picture and the viewer is able to focus on distractions that we would never have noticed in reality. Removing these distractions can bring the image closer to they way the photographer originally perceived it. I think it’s not only a question of “how far is too far?”, but how far is appropriate? How far tells the story?
Lets face it, we already went pretty far when we put the camera in our hands.
Images are not reality - they are merely our reality.
