PHOTOGRAPHY: Digitally Altered Photography: The New Image-Makers

PHOTOGRAPHY: Digitally Altered Photography: The New Image-Makers
▪ 1995

      Following football hero O.J. Simpson's arrest in June 1994 for the murder of his ex-wife and one of her friends, Newsweek and Time magazines ran the same police mug shot of Simpson on their covers. Newsweek's version was a straight reproduction with normal tonality. Time electronically manipulated the photo to darken it and achieve a brooding, menacing quality that emphasized Simpson's unshaven cheeks and African-American skin tones. The alteration offended many readers and raised an increasingly familiar question: In an age of computer-controlled images, can anyone still trust a photograph?

      Altering a digitized image, as Time did for its cover, has been one of the fastest-growing, most far-reaching, and most controversial techniques in contemporary photography. With this method a photograph is scanned, digitized (converted into a set of numeric values), and entered into a computer from which the operator can control the image virtually in any way imaginable: add, delete, or change the position of visual elements; modify tones and colours; create montages; combine photographs; and even create entirely imaginary scenes. The digitized image can be stored in a data base, outputted as a print or transparency, or converted for video-screen display from a CD-ROM or Photo CD.

      Electronic image manipulation arrived in force in the 1980s with a powerful new breed of computers that cost on the order of $500,000 or more and occupied an entire room. More compact and far less expensive desktop systems soon proliferated. The necessary hardware and software for at least limited image control became available at chain-store prices.

      The manipulation of photographs is not new. Long before electronic technology, photographs had been enhanced, edited, faked, and used to fabricate reality. In the latter 19th century, double exposures and darkroom trickery created ghostly "spirit" photographs that fooled even doctors and scientists, and in Stalin's era fallen leaders such as Trotsky were airbrushed out of group photos. Modern computer technology has vastly improved the ease, extent, and realistic results of such manipulations.

      Electronic image control, which is applicable to both still images and full-motion video, has been welcomed enthusiastically as a new tool by graphic artists, art directors, producers of television commercials, and filmmakers in search of novel special effects, as witnessed by the startling realism of digitally fabricated scenes in the 1994 feature film Forrest Gump. However, what is acceptable in advertising and entertainment and as obvious satire and spoof causes concern when used to alter news, documentary, or other informational images.

      The Simpson cover is but one example of a practice that has repeatedly stirred controversy. Similar criticism was leveled when National Geographic moved two of Egypt's Giza pyramids for a better cover composition, the St. Louis (Mo.) Post-Dispatch used a computer to excise a soft-drink can in a picture by a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, and Newsweek published an electronically altered picture of Rain Man costars Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman posing together when, in fact, they had been photographed separately in New York and Hawaii.

      Responsible editors, photographers, picture agencies, and professional organizations have attempted to establish ethical codes regarding the use of electronic manipulation in news photography and to prevent copyright infringement by electronic means in commercial practice. Nevertheless, with digital technology so inexpensive and widely available, regulation has become increasingly difficult.

      The ever rising flood of digitized visual information may not, as some critics fear, fatally subvert the certainty of photographic evidence. Yet many observers agree that both suppliers and consumers of photographic information must exercise greater care than ever before to distinguish fact from fabrication in the images they use.

      (ARTHUR GOLDSMITH)

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Universalium. 2010.

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