Where should we draw the line in photo-manipulation?: Having obtained a new digital SLR and a copy of Photoshop in the last few weeks, I have been busily snapping away and pushing bits in post-production. About a week ago, I snapped a shot of a tree more or less sihouetted against clouds illuminated by the setting sun. Later that evening I shot the moon. Three days later I spliced the two shots well enough that a photographer friend of mine didn't notice what I'd done. This triggered a discussion on the concept of implied representation in photography. What do you all think? When considering photography as art (e.g., excluding photojournalism), where should we draw the line (if anywhere) in photo-manipulation? posted by Anonymous @ 5:30 PM
4 Comments:
There is no line, nor d9es there need to be one. Art isn't gymnastics - i.e. it shouldn't be juddged by difficulty. And if we discount photoshop, why are we allowed to use filters? Bounce cards? Macro-lenses? It's because we know that photography isn't about direct representation, but is generally more impressionistic, and due to photoshop, sometimes just surreal. Granted, there's a great deal of talent that goes into straight, unmanipulated photgraphy, but if I can make the exact same result using photoshop, what's the difference. If your art can't stand on its own witout you standing over eveybody's shoulder describing the purity of the process, then it wasn't art to begin with. It was an excercise. Art is expressive, not a competition for bragging rights.
On artistic merit: Prometheus' studio recording analogy is very illustrative, as is Bookie's point about art's need to stand on its own without the protection or explanation of its creator. I would add some caveats to the latter, however. Like anything to which we attribute meaning, context forms some part of that meaning. I don't mean to imply here that it is simply an additional part which can be removed, leaving behind the "core" nature of the art; rather, the context of the viewers and the art informs the perception (light, surroundings), and the expectations (photos in an exhibition of war journalism are assumed not to be significantly modified with post production, photos in a book about the history of photo manipulation are) of those experiencing the art. Thus, if Eudemonic's photo is presented as a non post produced photo (or in a context that implies that assumption) then we have a problem, although I'm not sure if it is an artistic problem. I can imagine an art exhibit whose purpose was to deceive people into thinking that altered photos were not such. Of course, the photos would still have to be interesting once people realized the deception if the artist wanted them to be considered good art on their own (rather than his whole installation being considered a sort of extended performance art piece).
So to conclude, if a photo is interesting, then alterations, digital or otherwise, that were part of its development are immaterial (except in the sense that some people find knowledge of the methods adds to their appreciation of the finished work) to its artistic merit. But it is still of interest whether or not those observing the photos are aware of the alterations. That might tell us something about the artist.
On our obsession with fact: Eudemonics' and Prometheus' points about embellishment making stories, or music (respectively) more compelling, or more real than the raw versions thereof raises an interesting point. The obsession with equating truth with factual truth is, as I understand it, a modern malady resulting from conceptual bleed-over from the scientific paradigm (that’s right, I said paradigm, it has officially been 5 years since the end of the 90’s and I am proud to announce that the bans on the words “paradigm” and “ironic” are hereby lifted!). Our modern world-picture (in most industrialized nations) is heavily influenced by scientific pictures of the world because so much of what surrounds and impacts our daily lives is the fruit of scientific inquiry. And make no mistake, in many instances, scientific pictures have illuminated issues and helped sweep away wrong (rats reproduce by spontaneous generation from dirty rags)damaging (bleeding sick people to remove the bad "humors" is a good medical practice) and in some cases evil (certain "races" are genetically superior to others) concepts. However, I feel that in the last century and in the last few decades especially, we have lost touch with the purpose and limits of science.
Science, and by extension, scientific language and explanation, are designed to pursue specific goals, namely delivering a physical description of the world and providing predictive power about physical events. Science and its language is very good at pursuing these goals mostly because it has been tailored to fit them. However, science is piss poor at answering other sorts of questions, viz. ethical, moral, artistic, emotional, and political. To be sure, science can provide many useful facts relevant to those questions (is there a genetic predisposition to homosexuality? How do chemical imbalances in the brain affect mood, etc) but those questions are not framed in scientific language, nor should they be, and they do not seek to answer scientific problems. But we tend to forget that, and increasingly we try and recast old questions in a mold and language exceedingly ill suited to deal with them. The results are thing like the ridiculous supposed “conflict” between the theory of evolution and creationism. Even my previous sentence is infected with the unspoken assumption that it makes any sense whatsoever to talk about the two as if they were two competing theories. Evolutionary theory, as a scientific hypothesis with a good amount of evidence supporting it, and few successful challenges to it thus far, is completely unconcerned with the origins of the universe, be they divine or quantum. It is concerned, like all science, with description and prediction, whereas the question of origin of the universe (as creationists see it) is a theological one and has nothing to do with science. Scientific evidence is not relevant to the latter, just as scripture is not relevant to the former.
Okay, so what has any of this got to do with art? This sanctification of the scientific world picture has caused us to force an out of place need for physical factuality onto questions where it is at best an equal partner with other aims and at worst wholly irrelevant. The examples at hand are modified photos, or studio produced music, but I would point to history as another prime example. While we certainly have a keen interest, both practical and academic, in deducing facts about historical events, this is by no means the only, or even the most useful purpose of history.
Shakespeare’s histories take many liberties with historical fact as we understand them today, but they still provide some of the most compelling and thought provoking stories humankind has ever produced. History serves as a way of understanding and learning about our present and future from our ideas about the past. Precise factual accuracy does not necessarily always serve this end and it is no sin to willfully embellish a story to bring out an important idea, conflict, theme or lesson. Such stories can be more true (not in a factual sense) than unadorned recitation of known facts. For instance, there are many different accounts of Julius Caesar’s life and murder, from HBO’s recent series “ROME”, to Shakespeare’s play, to accounts by his contemporaries in ancient Rome. The details and style vary from telling to telling, but all of them contain powerful lessons and food for thought about the nature of power and ambition both with respect to the state and the individual. I am curious as to what “really” happened, but by no means do I consider a scientifically (archeological) supported account more universally relevant than Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
In conclusion, I am concerned that we sometimes attempt to subsume all of our thought and inquiry under one privileged picture of the world (the scientific one, although there are many who use a religious one), which is treated as somehow more universally valid and correct than any other picture or paradigm. In doing so we often lose sight of the context purpose of many of the questions we ask about things that are not directly answerable by the physical descriptions of science. We are, in short, distracted from solving those problems when we are forced to combat inconsistencies and absurdities that arise from casting our problems in language completely unsuited to answering them.
Phew, sorry about the length of that one. I hope it made some small amount of sense.
Speaking of photo manipulation, here's an article about attempts to catch photo fraud in scientific journals.
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