Photoshop Freak-Out

I’ve been following the recent discussions around the OVER-ness of photography with great mirth. Mostly, I can’t believe that the discussion is even talking place let alone the people discussing it. In fact, I get a little bored of myself even as I write this. Then, I remind myself that this has been a favorite pastime of photographers and theoreticians since the medium’s inception and I am soothed by the gentle repetition of phrases like “medium in crisis” and ” digital vs. analogue.” It’s long been my belief that photography is never and always “over”: never, in that, the medium, if defined etymologically as “light, writing” will never be “over” so long as light and chemical, sensor, paper, interact to form images and always, in that, defined by mechanics, photography will continually be redefined by the limits and/or potentialities of the mechanisms combined to make a photograph. Yet, mechanism is exactly where the discussion often gets waylaid and talk around the release of Photoshop CS5 is a prime example.

Take for instance, this piece by Stella Kramer regarding the horrifying addition of the Content Aware Fill. Stella, like many, sees this tool as the beginning of a slippery slope toward The End of Any Semblance of Reality where one won’t know “how anyone is going to be able to trust photography at all anymore.” The problem, poor Stella, is not how anyone is going to trust photography but why anyone “trusts” photography at all when Hippolyte Bayard, the defamed inventor of the positive printing process, showed us photography’s first fake literally within months the world’s first public exhibition of photographs on June 24th, 1839?

Hippolyte Bayard; Self Portrait as a Drowned Man, 1840

So, why do we have such high expectations when the photograph itself has been synonymous with trickery since its invention. What part of our animal brain is so opposed to the acceptance that images lie. Perhaps the problem starts in photography’s mimesis of human sight. The photographic image sends a signal to the brain that this image is akin to what one would see with one’s eyes and therefore reflective of reality. We have learned over millennia to trust our senses and most importantly our sense of sight therefore, we trust photographs. Armchair analytics aside, it is this primal expectation of truth that so often confounds our ability to think critically about photography.

Madonna; believe it or not.

Stella pleads, “What’s to stop people from removing critical information from photographs, like a person or a weapon? If you can remove things so easily from a photograph, what’s to stop people from re-creating events to suit their own purposes? Do you think the Chinese government wouldn’t want to remove the man who stood in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square?” I answer, nothing, nothing at all. Nothing ever has stopped this from happening and nothing ever will. It’s just easier now so, as image makers, educators, and consumers it is imperative for us to think a little more critically about what we are viewing. As for the Chinese government, they would do exactly what they did do which was eliminate the offending image from google searches (until recently, of course).

Google Search before and after Google circumvented China’s censorship (click above for larger image)

Point being, so long as there are ways to manipulate an image or the dissemination of an image, they will be employed for good or evil or beauty or whatever the whim of the person in control of the manipulation. That said, I suggest we all head over to createLive (seriously, go deeper, there are FREE classes on just about everything on this site) and learn how to use these fascinating new tools. Then revisit good ol’ Benjamin, Barthes and Sontag for a refresher on why one must never believe a photograph in the first place.