"Digital manipulation... bad for photography" - Outside Magazine

[Bruce Watson]

It's always interesting to me how manipulation in photography is bad, but far more egregious manipulations in paintings are somehow "art". I'm thinking of this wonderful portrait hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in London of Queen Elizabeth I. Does anyone think Queen Elizabeth really looked like that?

Outside of copying flat art, photography *is* manipulation of reality. It's the very nature of the beast. If you make a photograph of a 3D scene, the resulting photograph is, by definition, a 2D abstraction of that 3D scene. B&W adds the additional abstraction of the removal of hue and saturation information. Color adds the problem of not seeing the scene's colors the same way that the human eye/brain system sees them, and therefore getting both the colors wrong, and the relationships between colors wrong. And let's just forget about lighting (especially in portraits), selective focus, and all the other manipulations that photographers make. Adding those manipulations to the discussion just takes us farther down the rabbit hole.

Photography of 3D scenes can not be, by definition, reality. That's obvious to anyone who thinks about it for more than a few seconds. So why this fixation on manipulation in photography? I guarantee anyone if they could be at the scene of one of Adams' photographs holding one of his prints, the comparison between the scene and the print would take their breath away. The scene and the print aren't at all the same, because Adams manipulated the hell out of the it during exposing and processing the film, and in particular, in printing. And this was long before Photoshop.

But I guess it's too much to ask that people examine their own preconceived notions. It's a photograph so it must be real? Please.

[Toyon]

I don't see it as entirely a moral issue. The best art has come out of momentous struggles to transcend the medium. Artists stretch themselves by coming up against barriers of stone, pigment, ink, silver gelatin, instrumental and vocal limitations and break through to create luminous, intense, powerful works in egg tempera, marble, reactive chemistry and paper, via horsehair bows, calloused fingers and damaged vocal cords. It is not the struggle per se, but the application of mental energy and drive against a seemingly immovable obstacle. A problem with photoshopping is twofold, it is both too easy and too beholden to a distant corporation and its captive, insular zoo of programmers. This is not to say that some people don't work hard to manipulate images and forge them into interesting photo illustrations, but rarely so. The application of the brain to a problem is not the same as the application of the hand and the brain to the same problem. Together, throughout history, great art and advances have not come without the application of at least two forces. In writing, I would substitute the internal music of language in place of the physical use of the body as the second force. Essentially, heavily photoshopped images, such as the ones illustrated in the article are specious - they appeal to our sense of wonder by juxtaposing improbable elements, but they do not create anything new or add up to an original way of seeing. Like fast food, their interest fades quickly, like hollywood special effects, and we are left wondering what's new and better. Not true, in my experience, with a work by Kertesz, Cartier-Bresson, Levitt, Koudelka, Shore or Eggleston.

[Marko]

A problem with photoshopping is twofold, it is both too easy and too beholden to a distant corporation and its captive, insular zoo of programmers.

Anybody who says it's too easy has not seriously tried it. Too easy compared to what exactly? Too easy to accomplish which level?

I agree that it is too easy to create obviously manipulated images. That's because if it is obvious, it is obviously not done right. To do it right takes a lot of knowledge, skill and judgment. Be it in Photoshop or in traditional lab.

As for being captive to a distant corporation... Which one exactly did you have in mind? Was it Kodak or Fuji? Or perhaps Ilford?

Essentially, heavily photoshopped images, such as the ones illustrated in the article are specious - they appeal to our sense of wonder by juxtaposing improbable elements, but they do not create anything new or add up to an original way of seeing. Like fast food, their interest fades quickly, like hollywood special effects, and we are left wondering what's new and better. Not true, in my experience, with a work by Kertesz, Cartier-Bresson, Levitt, Koudelka, Shore or Eggleston.

How about Uelsmann? Or even Adams, as Bruce mentioned above...

[Donald Miller]

I wonder how much of this disagreement with digital manipulation is based in elitism.

e⋅lit⋅ism  /ɪˈlitɪzəm, eɪˈli-/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [i-lee-tiz-uhm, ey-lee-] –noun

1. practice of or belief in rule by an elite.
2. consciousness of or pride in belonging to a select or favored group.

or...could it be "sour grapes"?

noun pretended disdain for something one does not or cannot have: "She said that she and her husband didn't want to join the club anyway, but it was clearly sour grapes."

Donald Miller

[Brian Ellis]

And then there are those who want to ban Photoshoping in some adds:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/photoshop_laws/

<quote>The Photoshop wars are heating up again, with politicians in the UK and France calling for legislation to regulate digital nipping, tucking, and smoothing of images in ads and elsewhere.

The reasoning behind the moves to police fantasy Photoshopping is - as is all too usual in such cases - to protect those delicate flowers: impressionable youth.

"When teenagers and women look at these pictures in magazines, they end up feeling unhappy with themselves," Liberal Democratic Party MP Jo Swinson told The New York Times.

Swinson has convinced her party to adopt her proposal to institute a labeling system for digitally altered ads and to ban them altogether in ads targeted toward children under 16.

French parliamentarian Valérie Boyer is fighting the good fight at the other end of Le tunnel sous la Manche as well. "These photos can lead people to believe in realities that very often, do not exist," she has said.
</quote>

That's got to be some of the most ignorant politicians on the planet. Do they really not know that models have been airbrushed, retouched, made up, made down, nipped, tucked, and whatever else could be done to make them look better in photographs since the first model posed for the first photograph back in 1840 or whenever it was? And how nice that they're protecting their youth from Photoshopped models in magazines while the youth spend their after-school hours searching for porn on the internet.

[theBDT]

Anyone who is deeply alarmist or snobbish about digital manipulation is simply ignorant of the BOATLOADS of manipulation available in the traditional darkroom. Here's a hint: before Photoshop, people used airbrushes...

[Marko]

That's got to be some of the most ignorant politicians on the planet. Do they really not know that models have been airbrushed, retouched, made up, made down, nipped, tucked, and whatever else could be done to make them look better in photographs since the first model posed for the first photograph back in 1840 or whenever it was? And how nice that they're protecting their youth from Photoshopped models in magazines while the youth spend their after-school hours searching for porn on the internet.

Perhaps if they/we aimed to protect their/our precious youth from overeating garbage food and from obsessing over empty celebrity gossip, maybe the said youth's self-consciousness would become less fragile?

[percepts]

it's not a question of manipulation but rather the intent of manipulation. If the manipulation is designed to deliberarely deceive the viewer can we say that is bad?
That opens a lot of questions about what deceiving the veiwer means and that is open to subjective interpretation so you will never a get to an answer that is acceptable to all. Therefore you are banging your head against a brick wall by arguing about it.

There is a simpler way and that is to make a judgment about the work based on whether the creator makes a statement about manipulation or not. That shows some integrity on the part of the creator and if they state that images have or have not been manipulated then no one can have cause to complain unless they find they have been lied to.

But if they state nothing then the work is suspect as being not as literal as it might be. You just don't know. Does it matter? That's personal opinion. The viewer can then make their own judgment. And if the creator states not manipulated except for contrast, colour and maybe sharpening, then the viewer has a right to expect that.

But then how do you know if the creator is telling the truth? So then it comes down to whether you the viewer want to beleive it or whether you are a supicious sort judging others by your own standards. But that would mean you have a closed mind to other ideas, beliefs and cultures and have no desire to understand them.

Beauty as they say, is in the eye of the beholder...

[Michael Gordon]

Here's my take.

[Robert Hughes]

it's not a question of manipulation but rather the intent of manipulation. If the manipulation is designed to deliberately deceive the viewer can we say that is bad?

Good question - the entire moving picture industry is based on deceiving the audience. Who doesn't want to believe that a 16-year old English brat can fly on a broomstick, catch snitches with his teeth and defeat evil wizards?