tffi cnapterT o PnotograpnyTneory

out that cameras themselves have been made to conform to standards of Renaissancepainting: The round lens of the camera obscura that "naturally" creates a circularimage was modified by Renaissance painters and draftsmen to a rectangular formatto meet traditional expectations for paintings and drawings.s

Digital lmages and OntologyDigital images can be realized in many ways. (For example, see Plate 4 and ColorPlates 4, I0, 13, 14,16,21,22,23,3I, and Plate 32,Later in this chapter.) A tradi-tional photograph can be scanned, whereby it is translated into a numerical code,fed into a computer, and seen on a computer screen. The digitized photograph isnow made up of pixels-tiny squares arranged in a grid. The pixels can be changedone by one or in groups. Changes in color, brightness, and contrast can be made in-stantly, and parts of the photograph can be deleted or repeated ("cloned"). The di-mensions of the image can be altered, its edges expanded or cropped, and otherimages can be incorporated into it.

Digital photographs can also be made directly by means of digital cameras, elim-inating the step of scanning. Both types-scanned analog photographs and photo-graphs made with digital cameras-are lens-based. They, like traditional photo-graphs, depend on light reflecting off surfaces in the real world. Virtual images,however, are also possible; that is, images that are totally constructed mathemati-cally in the computer to simulate the structure and light of photographs made bycameras. Virtual images have no chemical or lens-based necessary connection to thereal world, although they are often made to look like they do, because they are care-fully constructed to simulate traditional photographs.

Fred Ritchin, picture editor for the New Yorh Times from 1978 to 1982, describescomputerized pictorial alteration as

translating a photograph into digital information (a numerical code that can beread by the computer) by using a device called a scanner. An image thenappears as the sum total ofmany tiny squares, called pixels, or pictureelements, each of which represents information as to the brightness and colorof that sector of the image. Once digitized, an image can be subtly modifiedpixel by pixel. The entire image can be altered in a variety of ways: colors canbe changed, the apparent focus sharpened, some elements can be taken out,and others replicated. The process also allows for the original images to becombined with another.g

Martin Lister, a British theorist of cultural studies who is especially interested inphotography and communication, explains the difference between traditional (opti-cally and chemically based) analog photographs and new digital images this way:

Tiaditionally, images have been analogue in nature. That is, they consist ofphysical marks and signs of some kind (whether brush marks, ink rubbed into

I

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Thepronoudigital tecluiments of thenew techpractrcesera of artisticity."15 Such

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e4 and Color4rter.) A tradi-merical code,lphotograph iscmbe changedrubemade in-d"). The di-pad" and other

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0ntological Concerns: What ls a Photograph?

scored lines, or the silver salts of the photographic print) carried by materialsurfaces. The marks and signs are virtually inseparable from these surfaces.They are also continuously related to some perceivable features of the objectwhich they represent. The light, for instance, cast across a rough wooden tabletop, becomes an analogous set of tonal differences in the emulsion of the pho-tograph. A digital medium, on the other hand, is not a rranscription but aconversion of information. In short, information is lodged as numbers in elec-tronic circuits. It is this feature of digitization which has meant that images cannow exist as electronic data and not as tangible, physical stuff.I0

He continues with the signifi.cance of the difference:

The material basis of the chemical photograph, the photographic emulsion, isa granular structure of silver halides dissolved in gelatin and spread onto aplastic or acerare base. This emulsion holds the nearest thing there is ro a pho-tographic "mark": the tiny light-sensitive grains of silver, the constituent bitsout of which an image is configured. This material basis of the photograph hasiong been industrially produced. It is put in place by workers in the factoriesof Kodak, Ilford, Fuji or Agfa. The individual photographer has never had ac-cess to this level ofsignification, except to control the degrees ofcontrastwhich various intensities of light reflected from an object in the real worldbring about within this granular field.Il

New digital technologies now grant the photographer unprecedented access tothis previously inaccessible level of information and signification (silver halides, forexample). The randomly granular field of the chemical photograph is now reconfig-ured into a precise numeric code, and the image can be changed by altering, adding,or removing pixels.

with traditional photographs, by some theories such as Barthes's, we can be cer-tain that something was in front of the lens that optically reflected light onto a chem-ical light-sensitive surface held in rhe camera; that is, that something in the realworld existed when the photographer intervened and took the picture. In this sense,something preexists the photographer's intervention in the forming of an image, andthis fact is the foundation of beliefs and episremological claims that the photographgrants us a privileged access to the real world and to truth that other media. such aspainting and writing, do not have.

The introduction of photography in the 1830s was accompanied by direpronouncements about the death of painting. At the end of the l9g0s, when newdigital technologies became available to photographers, prophecies and pronounce-ments of the death of photography were abundant, for example: ,.The advent of thisnew technology is changing the very nature of photography,"l2 computer imagingpractices signal "the end of photography as we have known it,"r3 bringing in ,,a newera of artistic exploration,"t4 and causing "a transformation in the nature of visual-iql"15 Such claims are epistemological in nature.

Chapter 7 o PhotographyTheory

EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONCERNS:ARE PHOTOGRAPHS TRUE?

Does traditional photography get closer to the truth than do painting and otherforms of representation? Do digital images falsify knowledge and undermine beliefin photographs? These questions, around which theory has been built, receive dif-ferent answers. This discussion is sometimes called the ontological debate, becauseit has to do with the philosophic nature of the photograph-its ontological status(what a photograph is) and what follows from how one conceives of a photograph.In an ensuing epistemological debate, theoretical claims and counterclaims are madeabout the knowledge that photographs can or cannot bear, and photographic truthand falsity. The differing answers can be grouped into two major theoretical stances,one realist and the other conventionalist.

Realist Theory

In 1839, Arago promoted photography on the basis of irs "exactness," irs "unimag-inable precision," and faithfulness to realiq116 Daguerre himself wrote that "art can-not imitate [the daguerreotype's] accuracy and perfection of detail,"lT and EdgarAllan Poe, an early enthusiast of the medium, wrote "the Daguerreot)?e plate is in-finitely (we use the term advisedly) more accurate in its representation than anypainting made by human hand."lS Poe also attributed to photography "a more ab-solute truth" than ever before possible with pictures. For these thinkers, photogra-phy was scientific as well as artistic.

Photographic aids to seeing had been under development since the Renaissance.Around 1839 when previously fleeting photographic images were fi.nally fixed andmade permanent by chemical means, Europeans were in the midst of an enthusias-tic search for scientific knowledge of both the natural world and the social world.Photography grew up with the new science of sociology The guiding epistemologi-cal theory was positivism, which would have us believe that the methods of naturalscience can be directly applied to social science. As British art critic John Bergerwrote in 1982:

The camera was invented in 1839. Auguste Comte was just finishing his Cor.rrsde Philosophie Posith,e. Positivism and the camera and sociology grew uptogether. What sustained them all as practices was rhe belief that quantifiablefacts, recorded by scientists and experts, would one day offer man such totalknowledge about nature and society that he would be able to order themboth.le

Positivist investigators pursued facts-empirically verifiable and measurable-which would yield certain knowledge rhar was believed to be unbiased by the sub-jectivities of observers. Positivism was a supposedly disinterested and rational

method of inqu{observed by

" 4

tography was a{tive truths. As 4mechanical a'{seen as sources(for a history t(behaviour."20 j

IcREDTBTLTTY Ailqture of photog{or as a mediuuiphotography isiColeman wrotc j

!tography "is tttthings in convirlhas taught us 'la photographbjtendency to selthe photographjtograph rs due!thing photits reliance onveloped and

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Epistemologica|Concerns:ArePhotograph'r',.zKW|

method of inquiry that assumed there was an exrernal reality that could be neutrallyobserved by a detached observer. within the intellectual miheu of positivism, pho_tography was assumed to be the new scientific instrument that would itemize objec-tive truths. As Allan Sekula wrore in 19g6, "For positivism, the camera providesmechanical and thus 'scientifically' objective evidence or ,data'. photographs areseen as sources of factual, positive knowledge, and thus are appropriate documentsfor a history that claims a place among the supposedry oblective ,.i.rr.., of humanbehaviour."20

cREDIBILITY AND PERSUASTvENEss Regardless of what a person thinks abour rhe na_ture of photography, whether it is more accurately thoulht of as a unique mediumor as a medium of conventions it shares with other media, most critics agree thatphotography is accepted by the public as believabre. ',peopre believe photographs,,,Coleman wrote in rg7o,2t and Andy Grundberg .eiterated the point in r9g9: pho-tography "is the most stylistically transparent of the visual arts, able to representthings in convincing perspective and seamless detail. Never mind that advertisinghas taught us that photographic images can be marvelous tricksters; what we see ina photograph is often mistaken for the realthing."22 People have inherited a culturaltendency to see through the photograph to what is photographed and to forget thatthe photograph is an artifact, made by a human. The assumed credibility of the pho-tograph is due to the optical and chemicar relationship of the photograph to thething photographed, to its dependence on a mechanical device, th".a-".u, and alsoits reliance on western realism, especially the perspectival way of seeing that was de_veloped and codified by artists during the Renaissance.

Photographers are well aware of the aura of credibility the photograph has thatother media of representation do not share. Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, for exampre,wrote and made photographs in rhe cause of sociar reform and knowingry usedlhemedium of photography to give their writings more credibirity. Hine stated, ,,Theaverage person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify,,, but he wasquick to add, "you and I know Ithat] whire photographs may nor lre, iiars may pho-tograph."23 Although Hine knew that photographs could lie, he also knew rhat thephotograph was more persuasive and effective than the journalistic hand-drawn il-lustrations common in the earry r900s. paul strand, a student of Hines,s, berieved inthe realism of photography but took the idea into an aesthetic direction, namery, thestraighr aesthetic discussed in chapter 6. Strand declared that the *very essence,, ofphotography is "absolute unqualified objectivity.',24 This position, in due course,was furthered by Edward weston, Anser Adams, and many others of the straightaesthetic.

A belief in the trustworthiness of the photograph was fostered by the news media,especially Life magazine in the 1930s-1950s, when it was influeniial in society andin journalism' Gisdle Freund, photographer and writer about photography, claims,"what gave so much credibirity to it lLifel was its extensive use of photographs. To

Chapter 7 o PhotographyTheory

the average man, photography, which is the exact reproduction of reality, cannotlie."25 She explains, "few people rea\ize rhat the meaning of a photograph can bechanged completely by the accompanying caption, by its juxtaposition with otherphotographs, or by the manner in which people and events are photographed." Re-call from Chapter 5 how Doisneau's photograph of a Paris bar was variously and se-verely altered by texts that accompanied it. The electronic news media today rely onthe credibility of the images recorded by cameras.

Advertisers have long been knowingly using photographs because of their credi-bility. David Ogilr,y encourages his colleagues in his book Confessions of an Advertis-ing Man to use photographs: A phorograph "represenrs reality, whereas drawingsrepresent fantasy, which is less believable."26

Susan Sontag comments cuttingly on such uses of photographs:A capitaiist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vastamounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the in-juries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts ofinformation, the better to exploit the natural resources, increase productivity,keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.2T

No writing or painting can give Barthes the certainty of photography: "photogra-phy never lies: or rather it can lie as to the meaning of the thing . . . never to its ex-istence." Barthes's method of building theory is phenomenological. His writing inCamera Lucida is in the first-person singular, and he draws upon his direct experi-ence in looking at photographs. The following quotation elucidates his interestingand insightful subtheory of portraiture, which he derives from his experiences ofbeing photographed:

In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I wantothers to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one hemakes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stopimitating myself and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be)photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimesof imposture (comparable to certain nightmares). In terms of image-repertoire,the Photograph (the one I intend) represenrs that very subtle moment when,to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he isbecoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthe-sis): I am truly becoming a specter.2s

Another contribution to theories of realism is the concept of "transparency."Kendall walton, an aesthetician, identifies transparency as a unique and distinguish-ing characteristic of the medium of photography2e In walton's accounr, photogra-phy is special and significant because it gives us a new manner of seeing-a mannerof "seeing through" photographs ro the thing photographed. He is not claiming thatthe photograph gives us the impression or illusion of seeing reality but rather thatthe photograph allows us "to see things which are not in our presence" and that "the

viewer of the p!gument slmilar{objects in the fressarily cansedipainted, *" h-dthe photograflilens. For Wult rl

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Epistemological Concerns: Are Photographs True?

viewer of the photograph sees, literally, the scene that was photographed.,, In an ar-gument similar to Barthes's, walton argues that because the photograph is caused byobjects in the photograph, it allows us to see what was there. Paintings are not nec-essarily caused by what they depict. In cases of doubt about the existence of thingspainted, we have to rely on the painter's vision of what was seen; regardless of whatthe photographer believes, however, the photograph shows what was before theIens. For walton, photography is unique because photographs are transparent.

Photographs continue to be powerfully persuasive. Both susan sontag and Abi-gail Solomon-Godeau have commented on the credibility and resulting politicalpower of the photograph in relation to American abuse of Iraqis held at Abu Ghraibprison in Baghdad in2004. American soldiers, with personal digital cameras, tookunauthorized photographs of Americans abusing lraqis, and these photographseventually found their way into the news media, creating international outrage andnational embarrassment. Solomon-Godeau comments: "Appalling and politicallydevastating as [the photographs] are to the white House and the military their au-thenticity is unquestioned. The belated release of these picrures has yielded whatseems the unimpeachable truth (photography's original pR claim) that Americansoldiers have sexually humiliated and tortured their lraqi captives."30 written re-ports of the atrocities, however, had circulated for more than ayear and were ignored.by the government of the United States before the photographs became public. Son-tag comments:

The pictures will not go away. That is the narure of rhe digital world in whichwe live. Indeed, it seems they were necessary to get our leaders to acknowledgethat they had a problem on their hands. After all, the conclusions ofreporrscompiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other reportsbyjournalists and protests by humanitarian organizations about the atrociouspunishments inflicted on "detainees" and "suspected terrorists', in prisons runby the American military, first in Afghanistan and later in lraq, have been cir-culating for more than a year. It seems doubtful that such reports were read byPresident Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice or Rums-feld. Apparently it took the photographs to get their attention, when it becameciear they could not be suppressed; it was the photographs that made all this"real" to Bush and his associates. Up to then, there had been only words . . . 3r

Conventiona I ist TheoryTheoreticianJoel snyder is one scholar among many who disagrees with realist the-ories ofphotography:

The notion that a photograph shows us ,,what we would have seen had webeen there ourselves" has to be modified to the point ofabsurdity A photo-graph shows us "what we would have seen" at a certain moment in time, froma certain vantage point if we kept our head immobile and closed one eye and if

;W chaPterT r PhotosraPhYTheory

we saw things in Agfacoior or in Tri-X developed in D-76 and printed onKodabromide #3 paper. By the time all the conditions are added up we arepositing the rather unilluminating proposition that, if our vision worked likephotography, then we would see things the way a camer^ does.32

Snyder agrees that photographs seem like natural phenomena, but they are not,and he directs our attention to how we came to think of photographs as naturalphenomena.33

Snyder and coauthor Neil Allen Walsh point out some common conventions op-erant in supposedly realistic photography. ln photographing a horse running, for ex-ample, photographers ordinarily choose one of three conventions. By keeping thecamera stationary and using a slow shutter speed, they render the horse blurred andthe background stationary. By panning the camera on the horse as it runs, they ren-der the horse sharp against a blurred background. By using a fast shutter speed andstationary camera, they freeze both horse and background. Each of these pictures,the authors argue, might seem natural enough to us now but they remind us thatphotographers had to invent these ways of conveying motion in their still photo-graphs and that we had to learn photographers' conventions for representing motionso that we could understand their photographs.3a

Snyder's conventionalist arguments owe much to the theories of Ernst Gom-brich and Nelson Goodman. Gombrich writes about the history of art to revealhow different people in different cultures and time represent the world and under-stand those representations. Goodman is a philosopher interested in the differentways we represent our world through symbol systems such as graphs, maps,charts, and paintings. Both Gombrich and Goodman argue that pictorial realism isculturally bound. That is, what was realistic for the ancient Egyptians is not realis-tic for us; and perhaps more important, our version of realism, to which we are soaccustomed as convincingly realistic, would not be decipherable to ancient Eg;.p-tians. Styles of representation, realistic and otherwise, are invented by artists anddraftsmen in a culture, and then learned by viewers in that culture. Styles of pic-turing are made up of invented codes that become conventional. Realism, forGoodman, is a matter of a picture's codes being easlly decipherable, readily read-able. Ease of information retrieval from a style of picturing is mistaken by a culturefor pictorial accuracy because the viewers are unaware of the representational sys-tem within their own culture; they are too familiar with it to notice it. A style be-comes so easily readable that it seems realistic and natural-it seems to be the waythe world is.

Geoffrey Batchen, following Michel Foucault's philosophical methodology ofidentifying the origins of ideas and practice-the archeology of ideas-examines theorigins of photography, especially the intellectual context in which photographycame to be. Batchen acknowledges the realist claims of the early inventors, such asDaguerre's 1839 description ofphotography as a process that "consists of the spon-

taneousObscura,"delineatepheras, Batnature w-asBatchenality but to

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Epistemological Concerns: Are Photographs True?

taneous reproduction of the images of nature reflected by the means of the CameraObscura," and Talbot's claim, also made in 1839, that through photography "objectsdelineate themselves without the aid of the artist's pencil."35 While recognizing earlyphotographers' claims that Nature herself was making the images by means of cam-eras, Batchen reminds us of the aesthetic concerns of early practitioners with hownature was represented. By means of visual devices, "protophotographers," asBatchen calls them, for many centuries were attempting not merely to reproduce re-ality but to visually improve it, to make it "picturesque."

Batchen reminds us that Daguerre was a professional artist. As a teenager hesketched landscapes and later worked as an assistant in making large historicalpaintings, and exhibited paintings and drawings of his own. Talbot was also wellversed in the picturesque aesthetic of that time. Artists and leisurely travelers of theperiod walked the countryside and made drawings, and when Nature herself was notsufficiently picturesque, they used machines to enhance her beauty, including aportable camera obscura and a more portable device called the camera lucida thatwas invented in 180I. The camera lucida was a mirrored device that made naturelook reminiscent of landscapes painted by Claude Lorrain. It diminished details infavor of prominent features of a scene, toned down colors so that they looked likecolors in varnished paintings, bent trees so that they better composed a particularview, and allowed the photographer to hold both foreground and background infocus, achieving pictorial integrity.

Talbots morher hired landscape designers to give the Talbot's land ideal pictur-esque scenes. Batchen quotes the Reverend William Gilpin as an influential contrib-utor to ideas about the picturesque who published travel books on the topic. Gilpindefined the picturesque as "expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty which is agree-able in a picture." Gilpin also said, "I am so attracted to my pictulesque rules, that ifnarure gets it wrong, I cannot help putting her right."36 Thus, the camera providednot^realway of seeing,brtta conyentionalway of seeing, using conventions that ad-hered to the aesthetic of the picturesque, popular at the time.

Photographic Truth

DIGITAL IMAGES The introduction of computer technology into photographic prac-tices is cause for alarm to realists because they see it as threatening the reality baseof photography, which for them is the optical and chemical relationship between thecamera and what it photographs. If the photograph's reality base is compromised, re-alists fear that the photograph's truth value is weakened or lost altogether. For con-ventionalists, the introduction of computer technology into photography is notalarming, but merely a continuation of practices that artists and photographers haveinvented and used throughout history to make expressive photographs'

Adrian Piper is a philosopher and an artist who uses lens-based images in herwork, and she ruminates on the special nature of the photograph and its ability to

ChapterT o PhotographyTheory

accomplish what other media cannot (a realist position) while acknowledging howimages are conventionally constructed:

They have a kind of transparency that other media don't have. Although thereare obviously a1l sorts of choices that go into what ends up in the photograph,and there are all sorts of ways in which it can be manipulated. Even given allyou can do with changing the photographic image using Photoshop, I stiilthink that there is a directness ofreference to the thing that is photographed.It's less mediated by individual idiosyncratic choices about how to render-allof those things-than other media.37

Piper's thoughts offer a calming and balanced view of computer technology and pho-tography: There is something special about the photograph's relation to what is pho-tographed, even when that information is adjusted with Photoshop.

By means of computer-enhanced photographic technologies, we can see "distantplanets, the inside of a beating heart, a molecule that is a concept, and we can movethrough buildings which have not been built."38 Scientists invested in scientifictruth don't fear computer-enhanced images; they use them. Astronomers, for ex-ample, make digital.images by using charge-coupled devices (CCDs). These light-sensitive chips produge small regions of electrical charges when struck by light. Thelight-induced charges can be read as an image and can be greatly enhanced with theaid of a computer. CCDs are much more sensitive to light than is film: A two-minuteexposure with a CCD is equivalent to a thirty-minute exposure with conventionalfilm. CCDs provide images of 16 million pixels, 4,000 by 4,000 square, and have re-placed photographic fi.lm in professional astronomy. A new camera tested in 1999 in-creases the 16 million pixels of CCDs to over 67 million pixels. It has a field of viewlarger than the moon. The camera, a wide-field imager (WFI), uses a mosaic assem-bly of CCDs linked to computers and telescopes, sometimes located in differentparts of the world, and renders images with levels of detail exceeding by a factor of10,000 what the naked eye is able to see.3e

Messier GridMap, by astronomer Paul Gitto (Plate 3l), is a composite of ll0CCDs of celestial objects in the Northern Hemisphere that he made from dawn todusk on the first day of spring with a CCD camera and a telescope. The images repli-cate a handwritten list of objects made by Charles Messier, an eighteenth-centuryFrench astronomer. Gitto's grid, based on Messier's astronomical catalogue, haseleven rows and ten columns in numerical order. beginning in the upper left withMl, the Crab Nebula, and ending in the lower right with MHO, a small ellipticalgalaxy in Andromeda. The image was made not to be reproduced in a book or tohang on a gallery wall, but to be displayed on the Inrerner as an inreractive imagethat coexists with the other 109 images to which it is linked. a0

CCDs are enhanced electronically so that features of objects that could not beseen otherwise are made visible through a rarrge of operations called image process-ing. These extensive operations are not possible with film. The CCD camera first

PLATE 31.o Paul Gitto, Ihe

Epistemological Concerns: Are Photographs True?

: how

:: Dho-::: !hO-

PLATE 31. Paul Gitto, Messier Grid Mop,1999.o Paul Gitto, The Arcturus Observatory'

ChapterT r PhotographyTheory

subtracts electronic neiss-un\M4nted electrons caused by factors other than lighthitting the chip material-from the image. Usually, a number of images of the sameobject are taken and electronically merged into a single calibrated image that thenundergoes further processing. The processes are designed to reveal or hide, sharpenor soften, lighten or darken, and color different facets of the image's details otherwisehidden in the electronic data. Using an unsharp mask, one can also enhance small-and medium-scale detail; log scaling enhances weak signals by increasing the pixelvalues of the fainter pixels; histogram equalization makes the brightness of all thepixel values the same. These image-enhancement processes combine art and scienceto turn digital data into images of scientific value and aesthetic beauty.

Journalists are now widely using digital technologies and, as they have since pho-tography became available, continue to rely heavily on photographs to report on theworld. credibility is paramount for journalists, and whereas they have enjoyed theassumed credibility and authority of photographs in the past, they are aware tharthe possibilities of misusing digital processes can undermine society's implicit trustin the photograph. with the relative ease of manipulating photographs throughcomputer technology, their fears of false but credible and influential images beingcirculated are justified. The digital photograph is a mathematical formula that can bemodified by simply adjusting the formula. some digitized photographs presentedand accepted as journalistic or evidentiary photographs pose threats to photo-graphic veracity

A newspaper editorial in 2004 quoted a former head of photography for StateFarm Insurance Company who claimed, "what you can do in a darkroom is 2 per-cent of what Photoshop is capable of doing." The editorial noted that many policedepartments have switched to digital photography because of lower cost and higherefficiency, but expressed worry over how easy it would be to digitally manipulate ev-idence. The editorial was prompted in part by the release on the Internet of a digi-tally doctored photograph in 2003 that showed presidential candidateJohn Kerry ona speaker's platform with Vietnam antiwar activistJane Fonda in an attempt to smearthe candidate in the eyes ofveterans.4l

Two older journalistic examples are now notorious. on the February 1982 coverof Nationql Geographic, editors visually shifted two pyramids closer together to bet-ter fit the vertical format of the magazine; Time's cover, June 27 , 199+, about thearrest of o. J. simpson for the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman, fea-tured a digitized version of the Los Angeles Police Department's mug shot of Simp-son. Time's illustrator, however, darkened Simpson's skin (dark skin implies moreguilt than light skin?), ro the outrage of many readers who interpreted the manipu-lation to be racist. The ability to convincingly alter photographs undermines imageauthentication in courts of law, the enforcement of missile-verification treaties, andother documentary uses of photographs.

colin Jacobson, editor of the book underexposed: censored pictures and HiddenHistory, an exposd of censored and distorted photographs, shows many examples of

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Epistemological Concerns: Are photographs True?

digitally altered photographs .a2 rn rgg3, for example, somalis dragged a dead Amer-

ican soldier through the streets of Mogadishu. The sordier was clothed only in hisunderpanrs that revealed a part of his genirals. whenTimep'blished the phoiographthe editors digitally covered that detail.

In 1991 the National press phorographers Association (NppA), aware of emerg-ing technology that enables "the manipulation of the conrent of an image in such away that the change is virtually undetectable," adopted the following principle ofphotographic erhics: "As journalists we berieve the guiding principle of our profes-sion is accuracy, therefore, we believe it is wrong to alter the content of a photographin any way that deceives the public." The Nature photography Association, however,does not have "any principle so strong," and instead

",,'bru.., ,,poetic license.,, In

1996, exposes in the Denver Posf and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer revealed,that Artwolfe fabricated photographs in his nature book, Migrations: ,,tn about a third of thebook's images the wildlife-caribou, zebra, geese,greater sandhilr cranes-had beendigitally enhanced, and some had been digitalry croned and murtiplied.,,a3

ANAL0G MANIPULATT0NS Examples of manipulations of photographs prior ro digitaltechnology are plentiful in rhe hisrory of photography Manipulaiions of two kindsare available: altering the subject matter before photographing it to suit the photog-rapher's purposes, and distorting photographic negatives or prints after initial expo-sures have been made.

Regarding the alteration of subject matter, consider, for example, F Holland Day'sphotographs of the crucifixion of Jesus, such as ch',st with Mary and saint, mad,e in1898, available through the Library of congress. Certainly Day's crucifixions andother fictitious pictorialist images by him and others ur" ,ro, deceptive in intent norresult, but they point to a historical tradition of altering sublect matter and prints forexpressive purposes. Henry peach Robinson's tenets of pictorialism, expressed in hisbookPictorial Effect in photography: Hints on Composition and Chiaroscuro, first pub-lished in 1869, advise practirioners of pictorialism to imitate paintings by England'sRoyal Academy of the Arts for themes and subjects as well as techniques. Robinson,srecommended techniques include "selecting, arranging, rejecting, and rearrangingelements to produce a pleasing resurt . . . if necessary by assembring models, p-pr,and costumes, and by combination printing, and montage purr"-rrpl,,r,

Edward steichen photographed Hawaiian hula dancer Tootsie it"". u, part of anadvertising campaign for the Matson cruise line in r94r. steichen constructed hisversion of an "authentic native": Steer recalls that Steichen sought out dramatic nat-ural backdrops, and that he instructed her to stop cutting her hair, to clip her nairs,and to stop using nail polish.a5

Kenneth Brower, a journalist who specializes in ecologicar issues, began accom,panying nature photographers when he was twenty-one. Brower assisted renownednarure photographer Eriot porter, then age sixty-four, on the Garapagos Islands,"helping to lug Porter's 4 x 5 cameraand tripod up vorcanoes, rowing iories in tough

W chaPterT r PhotograPhYTheory

surf, and hunting meat, like Robinson Crusoe, on various islands . . . It was one ofthe best times of my lifs."46 On that particular journey Brower met former Disneycameraman Tad Nichols and British nature photographer Alan Root, who along withPorter exchanged stories of work in the wild, specifically, fake nature photographs.

Porter was a purist and was opposed to changing the environment to photographit, but did uncomfortably admit that he occasionally moved a stone or feather orpiece of driftwood to improve a picture. John Rohrbach, custodian of Porter's collec-

\ tion at the Amon Carter Museum, showed Brower a photograph of Porter "hackingaway at a cactus to get a picture of a roadrunner nest." Paul Strand was also a purist,

\but Rohrbach has prints in which Strand drew in manholes or etched out people tobalance his compositions. In the 1970s, Ansel Adams began removing "randomclouds" inMoonrise,Hernandez,New Mexrco, 1941, one of the most acclaimed pho-tographs of the twentieth century made within the realist, straight aesthetic.

Root told Brower the story of how one Life magazine cover came about, made byone of his colleagues. An editor in Manhattan imagined a photograph of a leopardand its kill in a tree backlit by a setting sun. "The photographer set off in quest of thisvision, traveling the East African savanna for weeks with a captive leopard, killingantelopes, draping the carcasses in the branches ofvarious thorn trees, and cajolingthe leopard to lie proudly on'the kill', a tableau that the photographer shot against asuccession of setting suns."

Nichols told about working on Disney's movie The LivingDesert. most of whichwas shot on a huge table, set up in a sound stage. For the film's famous sequence oflemming suicide, Disney workers bulldozed lemmings off cliffs. Brower recalls howDisney filmmakers made a documentary of a hawk killing a flying squirrel: "Assis-tant grip stands on tall stepladder with pouch of flying squirrels. Grip tosses squir-rels-unpaid rodent extras-sk)'ward one by one, as in a skeet shoot, until trainedhawk, after dozens of misses, finally gets it right."a7

CENS0RSHIP ColinJacobson shows many examples of willful distortions of truththrough censorship ofphotographs. He defines censorship as:

a disturbing concept, usually referring to the act of someone in authority whoprevents us from reading or hearing certain words or seeing certain images. Byimplication, it can also mean we are persuaded to accept phony material asgenuine or consider a distorted context as the supposed truth.

Regarding such overt forms of control, he also asks these rhetorical questions aboutless obvious means:

How often have government-inspired visual messages persuaded the populacenot to be alarmed at certain threats to its health or welfare? How many timeshave editors banned the use of a disturbing image, not on the basis of itsjournalistic significance but because it might upset the sensitivities of theirreaders? How often has a vocal and influential minority in society dictated tothe majority what may be looked at in culture and the arts? How many family

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Aesthetic Concerns: ls Photography Art?

picture albums have glossed over the mysterious woman standing behindUncle Arthur? a8

Jacobson provides hundreds of photographic examples in IJnderexposed of cen-sored or altered images, and notes that publishers engage in insid.ious forms of self-censorship by alleging that the public wants to be entertained rather thanoverwhelmed with harsh reality. IJnderexposed cites the example from the 1980s ofthe London Observer pulling a magazine cover image by Sebastdio Salgado of a severedrought in Mali on the pretext that it might disturb readers "enjoying themselves onthe beach during August Bank holiday" The paper replaced salgado's image with afashion photograph. similarly, during rhe vietnam war, the New yorh Times sup-pressed photographs of Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire in protest to thewar. The editors feared that such shocking images might cause readers to cancelsubscriptions.

During the first Gulf war, according to Jacobson, the obsenter in London was oneof the only publications to publish a gruesome photograph (see color plate 7) of anincinerated lraqi staring sightlessly in death from his destroyed truck. The Obsewet'seditor was inundated with protests for publishing the photograph. Jacobson observes,"The Gulf War was presented to the world as a squeaky-clean technological master-piece and the public were not encouraged to associate computer controlled, Iaser-directed weapons with subsequent human carnage."4g Kenneth Jarecke, thephotographer who made the image, objected, "the whole us press collaborated inkeeping silent about the consequences of the Gulf War and who was responsible."5o Inan inftoductory essay in underexposed, Harold Evans asserts, "when authority moyesto suppress it is usually an indication that they have little confidence in their actions-precisely the moment when a more informed debate can avert catastrophe."5l

onJune 4,1989, Magnum photographer sruarr Franklin photographed a protest-ing man in Tiananmen square standing in front of an approaching column of tanks.It is one of the most widely distributed images of China in recent years. Timemaga-zine's editors chose the protestor, the "unknown rebel," as one of the "top 20 revo-lutionaries and leaders of the twentieth century." However, to suit the politicalagenda of the democratic west over communist china, the photograph was shownwith little contextual information so as to clearly imply the brutality of the Chineseregime. In his book Photojournalism andForeignpolicy,DavidD. perlmutter says thatthe tanks maneuvered around the yelling protestor, but he blocked their moves andultimately jumped on the front tank, trying to persuade the driver ro turn back. Hisfriends ran out and pulled him away.52

AESTHETIC CONCERNS: lS pHOTOcRApHy ART?The question of whether photography is art, which was once hotly debated, espe-cially in the 1960s and 1970s, is no longer salient. The question has been answered