I like practical effects in movies, not CGI. Star Wars looks more ‘real’ than the Phantom Menace. The giant puppet Jabba the Hut looks more ‘real’ than the CGI cartoon Jabba that chatted up Han Solo in George Lucas’s new and improved Star Wars. But I’m a photographer, not a film maker, so when it comes to my own medium of choice, I’m a huge fan of Photoshop and it’s many clones and cousins.
I’m working with a fellow photographer this week who is a purist, the only ‘real’ photograph is one that is ‘straight out of the camera’ as they like to say in the industry. Once upon time there were no iPads and 41 megapixel phones, there was just a camera that used a lens to imprint a pattern on a light sensitive smear of chemicals on a bit of plastic. Photography was an expensive hobby and a profession that required a bit of training. Now it is virtually free and anyone and everyone is a photographer. Suck it up, Professional Photographers, the Glory Days are past.
This doesn’t mean that a real photographer with a five thousand dollar camera in their hands won’t take a better photo than someone grabbing a shot with their cellphone, but it does mean that millions of unskilled photographers are taking some damned amazing photos and videos with every kind of photo capture device imaginable. As a portrait photographer I can give directions, use light and shadow, and get a good image straight out of the camera. Give me a couple of minutes in Photoshop and I can make it into a pretty good image. Let me play with it for an hour and I usually tend to think of that as Art. And this is where one point in the debate likes rage. At what point does a photograph move into the realm of digital art?
The guy I’m working with this week told me the story of some National Geo photographer that got fired for submitting a photo that had been manipulated. I find that hard to believe. A quick Google does show a bit of petty nonsense where National Geo disqualified a winning image in one of it’s countless contests for being manipulated. Which is fine. Rules are Rules and it’s National Geo’s ball.
One of my favorite Photographers/Writers is David duChemin and in one of his books he spends a couple of paragraphs talking about how all photos are artifacts. Every photograph is a lie. Every single one. It’s a two dimensional representation of three dimensional reality. The colors the camera captures can be changed with the twist of a dial. Humans don’t see the world in Black and White, so all B&W photos are manipulated images of reality. And so on and so forth. Elitists who want photo manipulation banned need to have stricter rules for their contests, say all entries have to be made with the exact same model camera using the exact same settings and taken in the exact same location at the exact same time.
We alter reality every time we take a photo. We chose how to crop it, what settings to use, what lighting to use, what subject to shoot, and a hundred other little details. What’s so wrong about spending a few minutes after the image is captured to change things?
I can understand the outrage a bit. I remember being horrified when I read Ansel Adams books on photography-The Camera, The Negative, and The Print. The great nature photographer was all about photo manipulation. His fine art prints were the results of endless hours of burning and dodging and cropping. It is kind of funny to me that the National Geo contest that disqualified an image for removing an offending element was perfectly fine with Dodging and Burning. The Photoshop of Ansel Adams early days is fine, but the modern equivalent isn’t. Really?
For the most part, this is just stuff that Photographers care about. Every once in a while something like the Time cover of OJ Simpson or a Shark attacking a guy hanging from a Helicopter gets larger attention, but the everyday manipulation of images goes on without much comment. It’s common knowledge that the perfect women of Playboy were always airbrushed and it’s hard to look at just about any magazine cover and not notice excessive amounts of manipulation.
Fighting for ‘pure’ images is not a losing battle, it’s a lost battle.
