image manipulation in photograpy

[Steve J Murray]

I was looking at the Nov-Dec. issue of LensWork magazine recently. The portfolio of photographs by Nick Brandt caught my eye. It's a set of really gorgeous black and white photos of animals in East Africa. However, the more I looked at these photographs the more I realized something was strange about them. Opon closer observation it became obvious there had been a lot of manipulation done on these images, which made them very dramatic, but at the same time made them also seem less like "real" photographs, and more like "photographic art." In the technical section he states that he works with a Pentax 67 II, scans negatives into an Apple G 4, and does "dry dark room" work with Photoshop and a Wacom tablet. He prints on wide format Epson printers.

Now I know all photographers manipulate their photos to produce the best print that represents their vision. Manipulation may include everything from graduated neutral density and polarizing filters, special lenses, dodging and burning, etc. Brandt’s photos go a step beyond that. For instance, the photo entitled: Two Rhinos, Lewa Downs on page 71, shows two rhinos obviously. There appears to be a soft Gaussian blur on most of the image except for the heads of both rhinos, and the shoulder of the farther rhino. Taken literally, this would imply there are two planes of focus in this photo, since the rhinos are different distances from the camera. Since my brain “knows” a lens can’t do this, the photo begins to “feel” unreal to me. This photo and the others can be viewed on Brandt’s website: www.nickbrandt.com. You have to scroll to the right a bit to get to this particular image.

Now I may use some Gaussian blur to “improve” my bokeh from time to time, and photoshop is a wonderful “darkroom” tool for all sorts of image enhancements, but I’m wondering how many of you guys reading this forum use the power of photoshop to alter reality to the degree that Brandt is in these images. If you are, how far do you feel comfortable going before you no longer regard the image as a photograph and regard it more as a work of graphic art? Should there even be any technical distinction any more?

[Paddy Quinn]

"Now I may use some Gaussian blur to “improve” my bokeh from time to time,
and photoshop is a wonderful “darkroom” tool for all sorts of image
enhancements, but I’m wondering how many of you guys reading this forum
use the power of photoshop to alter reality to the degree that Brandt is
in these images. If you are, how far do you feel comfortable going before
you no longer regard the image as a photograph and regard it more as a
work of graphic art? Should there even be any technical distinction any
more?"

all photogrpahs alter 'reality". Strand got rid of manhole covers that spoiled the composition and at times added other elements that improved it.

Big question is, so what? Unless you are documenting scientific work or crime scenes etc it really doesn't matter. The photographs you talk about are "art" in the broadest terms - how they were made is really of little issue.

"The camera never lies" has always been the biggest lie of all, from the very first days of the medium.

[paulr]

I think there's still room for discussion. Visually sophisticated people know that the camera lies, but we also know, at least intuitively, that certain kinds of lies feel authentically photographic, while others feel added from the outside. There's obviously a huge gray area here ... it's one that photographers have been debating since the 19th century, and standards are certainly different for different kinds of photography.

I think what can seem disconcerting in the case that Steve brings up is that an image is using the syntax of a certain kind of photography ... one that can be trusted in certain ways ... but then contains elements that are jarring --that don't seem trustworthy in those same ways. We wouldn't experience this looking at something that we know to be a collage or a montage or a composited image, because we immediately know to expect a different set of conventions.

But when we read something at first glance as a "straight" photograph ... one that belongs to a certain tradition with certain rules, and then at second glance we see something that breaks that tradition and those rules, it can be jarring. The image stops working in the way we expected it to work ... so suddenly the burden is on the image to start working in some different way.

[Bruce Watson]

For me the question doesn't exist - I do what I need to do to create a print to match my vision. But then, that's why I'm working with an LF camera - to make art.

When I was working as a journalist, I did far more outrageous manipulations in the darkroom than I ever do with Photoshop today as an artist. I used hot straight Dektol to bring up the number on a player's jersey so his mom could read it, I used reducer, I pushed Tri-X until it screamed. I cropped so tight the image bled, I dodged and burned with abandon, and turn out prints so contrasty that you'd have thought I was blind. Until you saw the prints in the paper, where they took full advantage of what the press could, and could not, do. All under the gun of press deadlines. It was, as they say, a "learning experience."

Just because the image originates with a camera, doesn't make it "real" after all. It's already a 2D abstraction of a 4D world. If it's B&W, that's another abstraction. What's a little gausian blur compared to that? As long as he isn't telling you it's a documentary, I'm fine with it.

[Michael Gordon]

Brandt's images aren't being used as photojournalism in the pages of National Geographic, so who cares? Have you ever seen Jerry Uelsmann's work? All traditional silver, yet about as departed from reality as you can get. Any beef there?

Is this really about Brandt's images, or is yet another digital vs. traditional argument in disguise?

[Paddy Quinn]

One thing about the brand images is that in many ways they seem to draw as much on the havy (handed?) manipulations of the pictorialsts and their kin as anything else and for me look to the past as much as being anything avant garde.

"The image stops working in the way we expected it to work ... so suddenly the burden is on the image to start working in some different way."

Conversely, the burden is also on the viewer to give up their tightly held and perhaps cherished assumptions.

[paulr]

"Conversely, the burden is also on the viewer to give up their tightly held and perhaps cherished assumptions."

This can be true, too ... I think which matters more depends a lot on context. You won't get much love as a journalist if you composite events that never happened, as an extreme example.

In the case of Brandt, I've only looked a bit at his work. What I'm describing as expectations isn't really my own (or any viewer's) tightly held or cherished assumptions. It's a set of expectations set up by a common language. If an image or a whole body of work announces itself as belonging to the "straight" tradition, then a stray break with this tradition is jarring.

Work can claim a tradition or language through a whole range of visual clues, contexts, and bits of common language, that we who speak the languages have learned to interpret.

None of this is about accusing the artist of wrongdoing. It's just an observation about a common effect on viewers when work seemingly at random breaks with a tradition that it has adopted and from which it draws much of its power. This isn't the same as breaking a tradition because that tradition confined the artist's vision ... that kind of break is capable of explaining itself. A random break can briefly pull the viewer out of the world of the image ... leave him or her asking questions that are not the ones the artist was hoping for.

[Brian Ellis]

It doesn't sound like you carefully read the interview with Brandt that accompanied the photographs. He talks about the limited extent of his "manipulation" in Photoshop and in particular he discusses the soft focus effect to which you refer. He says he didn't get that effect by doing anything in Photoshop. He says that effect is in the negative.

Photographers have been manipulating photographs ever since there have been photographs. Eugene Smith changed the direction of people's eyes in the darkroom , the early photographers of the American West took skies from one photograph and moved them into another, the Pictorialists drew on their negatives with pencils and crayons, etc. etc. None of that stuff seemed to bother them and whatever Brandt did doesn't seem to bother him, nor should it. I thought these were absolutely stunning photographs.

[Richard Boulware]

I think Paddy Quinn's first posting on this fundamental question is worth more discussion. I certainly agree what we all know to be true and that is the camera can and does lie.

One of photography's greatest strengths was, and still is to some degree the 'public' view that the camera does NOT lie. If perception IS reality, like politics...then I think we might be getting in to an area that we all should be concerned about.

I don't have an answer for this question, but some sixth sense and decades of experience makes me very wary of this question. The question? Are we using these ultra sophisticated editing and manipulation techniques...and destroying what the public thinks is some kind of visual authenticity and a photographic truth produced by optical reality.

Let me put it this way. Every morning when guy's shave, we trust in the mirror to guide a razor over our face, lest we cut out throat. We trust that mirror, even though the image is reversed left to right. We adapt, and still trust the mirror. With all this electronic manipulation, are we rushing into this new-found creative freedom, and at the same time unconsciously destroying what the public feels is some kind of photographic/optical "truth". Dangerous ground here...perhaps.

As I said...I don't have the answer, but I sure as hell feel it is a question worth asking and an area well worth our serious contemplation, lest in our photo-shop zeal we throw the baby out with the bath water. It would be like trying to shave every morning using a rippled fun house circus mirror. (Arrrgh. Pass the Band-Aid's please.)

Richard Boulware - Denver

[Aaron van de Sande]

I am not sure what is worse, gaussian blur or 'unsharp mask'.