Picture Envy No. 24 - And Pilate asked "What is truth?"

A quiet Memorial Day heads into the homeward stretch for me. I can see from my window the many wreaths placed at the foot of the Red Bank VFW statue, and during my lunchtime walk, saw the black-shrouded visitors at the local 9-11 Memorial. The one that stares out the Manhattan skyline from the banks of the Navesink, the river that cuts through this town that lost more people on that day four years ago than any other place besides New York itself.

Sy S., Gas Station, on Altphoto (May 27, 2005).

I'm going to take a different tack with Picture Envy this week, if only because I happened upon something that intrigued me and merits discussion on its own. I came across Altphoto (some shots on this site, it should be noted, are not safe for work) via Conscientious, a weblog that discusses photography (and, apparently, puts forth some rather left-leaning views on politics; I can do without the politics, but I like the discussion on photography). Altphoto is one of the websites out there where people can post their photos for comments and rating. I suppose that there are good sites for that sort of thing, and that there is a value to it. One can get a lot of useful information about how one should change shooting, processing or post-processing (i.e., photoshopping). I still am uncomfortable about this sort of thing, though. I can tell when people host my photos from Unbillable Hours on other sites because I can see the bandwidth drain. I've had a few occasions when I've noticed people copying my photos onto other sites. Moleskinerie, for example, has done so on a few occasions, but only to point to me, and I've appreciated the kind words I've received from that site's operator. In the one instance where I've found my photos being "pulled" to another site, draining my bandwidth, I've been less charitable in my response, as I found it more akin to plagiarism in how that (intentionally unnamed) site used my photo. Nonetheless, there are probably many points of merit and denigration that can be made with respect to sites like Altphoto that I don't want to address here.

I want to talk about Gas Station, the discussion associated with it, and why there is something about both this photo and the attitude behind it that I dislike. I come to this discussion – and this is relevant, as you will see – as an amateur with respect to post-development manipulation of images with Photoshop. I've learned a few tricks here and there – as can be seen by The Gates # 4, Untitled # 3, and (my favorite) Philosophy is a Walk on a Slippery Rock – but I am not terribly adept at using the application.

I trawled through Altphoto, tabbing images I liked when I came across Gas Station. First, I noticed that it reminded me of the work of someone else. I almost felt like I've seen that work before, either in my collection of photos by Walker Evans or in my viewings of Gary Winograd's work. It feels a lot like the famous Life magazine photograph taken by Andreas Feinenger, Route 66, Arizona, 1953. I liked the image, but I was also put off by how similar it was to the works of others.

Looking at it again, I realized there was something else that bothered me: it was surreptitiously unreal. The texture seemed too perfect. I wondered if the soil really had that yellow tone. Was the sky really that dark when the photo was taken? I've been out west; I worked in New Mexico for one summer and drove across country twice. I knew that, during the day, if the sky is light, it is light clear up to the farthest reaches of the heavens. Thinking about it logically, I knew the image is manipulated, even before I read the comments to the image. The mountains, I could assume, are the foothills to the Rockies. If they were, they run on a north-south axis into Canada. That means that, if this shot was taken on the western side of them, the photographer is facing east. For that sky to be that dark, it must be sunrise or sunset. If it's sunrise, for the mountains to be that light, there would be a sun flare coming from behind the mountains. The morning stars, and likely Venus, would be visible. If the photo was taken at sunset, then the mountains would be completely dark or as dark as the darkest portions of the eastern sky, as they would be losing their western-descending source of illumination. In other words, the sky could not have the shading gradient seen in this image. (And if we wanted to get really astronomical, the shadows of the parked cars, angling toward the mountains, indicate that it's a eastern facing view taken after the meridian point of the day, i.e., noon, and likely in the early afternoon, as the shadows are not long enough to indicate the angle of a later illumination by the sun.)

When I scanned the comments to the image, I saw this one by Havanai:

"You've apparently dodged (lightened) around the CAFÉ sign. The halo you created around the sign makes the manipulation too obvious and diminishes the otherwise appealing image."

I scrawled back up the page and checked out the shot again; sure enough, there was the halo mentioned by Havanai. While Havanai thought that the photographer, Sy S., lightened the sign (which he may have), I believe that the photographer darkened the sky around the foreground of the image. I scrawled back down to the comments. There, Sy S., the photographer responded to Havanai's comment.

"[Y]es thats [sic] true – but in my opinion this is what makes it special. [T]he manipulation is only onvious [sic] to people who know how to [manipulate photos, I presume]. [F]or all the others[,] the effect is nice! [M]y opinion … thanx [sic] anyway!"

(Ellipsis in original.)

Upon reading that comment, I was angry. It was as though the photographer had said to me "I'm going to mess around with this photo and you won't know because you are dumb." I have to wonder if others, upon seeing that, felt the same way. Looking back at the photo, I believed that I would have eventually noticed the dodging just as I had noticed the manipulation of the color of the sky.

What bothers me about this is that I feel, in a sense, that the image is now a lie to me. I cannot go to the place where Gas Station was photographed and see the same thing that the photographer represents as the image that he saw. I think this is because I believe that color photography, much more than black and white photography, is representative of "the truth." When I look at an image that I've taken, like Being There # 5, I know it represents what I saw that day in 2004 on the streets of New York (well, sort of; the image was shot while the camera was on my chest so that it would not be obvious that I was photographing; therefore, the image's perspective is a few feet lower than it would be if shot at my eye level). I have to admit, though, that I've manipulated the colors of things in photos or cropped out things I didn't like. I'm as involved in this misrepresentation as others like Sy S.

So what is it? What bothers me so? I guess it's that I wanted to believe – like others to whom photo manipulation isn't "onvious" – that the image was true. Color photos appear true to people, more so than black and whites (and these are heavily manipulated also; Ansel Adams did a lot to make his images as majestic as they were). Even though both color and black and white photographs are used in journalism, color photos are especially journalistic because they mimic – to some extent – what the eye sees.

Perhaps the appropriate response, for photographers, is to make explicit that they manipulate photos. Perhaps they should do nothing of the sort and maintain the mirage of reality in all cases except those with surreal or flawed manipulations. Perhaps the viewer should assume that all images are doctored. This last solution is the most troubling, as it renders impotent the journalistic intent of so many photographers.

I don't know what the solution is with respect to photo manipulation. The question is not new; such manipulation was always possible (basically). Manipulation is only relevant to this discussion now because it is so relatively easy with photo editing software in comparison to chemical manipulation in a darkroom. Even the general question about truth with respect to what we see is nothing new, as we can look at Plato and read him asking these same questions. Still, I ask: what do we do about this question of truth in the days of easy photo manipulations? How do we protect the viewers from seeing something like this and responding, as I did, with frustration?

Comments

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