Photographers have been manipulating their photos since the dawn of photography. From basic alterations such as cropping an image, to creating composite photos in the darkroom, photographers have been altering the meaning of their photographs for multiple reasons.
From creating more beautiful compositions by cropping, adjusting contrast, adjusting levels and curves to using the clone stamp tool in photoshop to remove people from the original image. Photoshop, in the right hands, can be used to create art that moves people. But in the wrong hands it’s a perfect tool to create propaganda and disseminate ‘fake news’ to the masses.
Gustave Le Grey took beautiful images of the French seascape in the 19th century, in a period where photography was still in its infancy. Photographers in this era had to make a compromise, to either set their cameras to expose for the sky or for the ground. This led to landscape photographs having over exposed skies or under exposed grounds. Gustave worked around this technological limitation by taking two photographs, one exposed correctly for the sky, and another photograph correctly exposed for the ground. Then in the darkroom he spliced the two images together to create an image no photographer at the time could produce, an image that had a correct exposure for both the ground and sky.
By creating this composite, I feel Gustave was able to achieve a more truthful photograph of the French seascape. He didn’t have the dodge and burn tools in photoshop to edit his image digitally but instead pioneered a new technique in editing photos in the darkroom. In my opinion Gustave has created a more truthful image as now we can see the full dynamic range in the landscape image, and still appreciate its beauty in the modern era where we have cameras that can take a high dynamic range photograph at a press of a button.
Here is a good example where digital manipulation has been used to alter the meaning of an image. This is a photo of President Trump’s inauguration in 2017 at the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, DC. The original image on the left, shows a relatively small crowd at the inauguration, and large white areas where there are no people. Whereas, the image on the right which was published is a heavily cropped version of the original image. This version of the image just shows us the first four rows of the audience, cropping out the empty white areas where many more people could have been.
To a viewer who has just seen the cropped version of the image, they might think that there was a good turnout to Trump’s inauguration, making them feel that he has a large support base. This is exactly what Trump’s office wanted, to make the public feel as if there was more support for his presidency than there was for President Obama. But the opposite was true, the amount of free white space in the original image shows us how small the turnout actually was, with just about half the space actually being occupied by the audience. Although the digital manipulation in this image wasn’t major, just a cropped version of the original, it completely changes the meaning of the image. In a high stakes event such as the inauguration of the president, the public’s opinion being swayed by a photograph that doesn’t show the true nature of the event is dangerous and I feel is borderline propaganda.
In my last example I want to explore how important it is for photography to be truthful in the photojournalistic medium. The photo on the left is the front page of The Economist, with Obama with his hands on his hips looking down at the ocean and an oil rig in the background. A very dramatic image, making us think about what Obama is looking at and leaving it up to us to fill in the gaps. This powerful image works very well as a cover photo especially because of all the negative space around Obama, isolating him, making the BP oil spill feel like a major tragedy that even the president is stunned by.
Now looking at the original unedited photograph on the right, we see Obama on a beach accompanied by two other people he is having a conversation with. Immediately this is a completely different photo to the one used on The Economist’s cover. The gravity of the situation feels much less as now we know what Obama was actually looking at, and looking around on the beach there is no oil to be seen.
Usually in photojournalism such heavy editing is unethical. Many photojournalists have lost their jobs for doing any major post production on an image for publication. The Economist has completely changed the meaning of the image by cropping it and clone stamping the woman on his right out of the photo, all to make the image fit to their story better. This is definitely a case where photography is not truthful as the person looking at The Economist’s cover is being misled by their editors to believing this heavily doctored image is reality. Usually when we look at well-known magazines and newspapers that feature news articles, we expect the accompanying images to be as truthful to reality as possible. It is a shame that such a well-known magazine such as The Economist can get away with altering an image so much and still get away with no repercussions.
To conclude, living in a digital age where we are constantly bombarded with images on social media, advertisements and news outlets, its almost a given that any image we see has gone through some kind of image manipulation. Whether it’s adding a filter on Instagram to using photoshop to create alternate realities, we rarely get to see the ‘true’ unedited photograph. It makes sense as to why there is such a public distrust in mainstream media and the current outbreak of ‘fake news’. No one knows who to trust, as everyone is trying to push their own agenda. This is not a recent phenomenon either, before photoshop photographers edited their pictures in the darkroom and before that artists drew pictures and paintings, altering reality to what an eyewitness would have perceived the scene as. It is just that in our era we are more aware of how the media we consume is created, and we constantly have to keep this awareness so as not to get influenced by the biases people who create our content have, and if the agenda they are pushing is true or not.
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