Just a few weeks before the Paris car crash that killed Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed, the Mirror, a London tabloid, published a picture of the glamorous new couple romancing on a boat, leaning toward one another, apparently about to kiss. It was all so provocative. In fact, though, that kiss never happened. The picture had been digitally altered; Dodi's head was rotated slightly to make it look as though a smooch was in the works.
The technical wizardry of this manipulation will impress few Synapse readers. Anyone who has spent five minutes fooling with imaging software knows how simple such tampering can be. Programs such as Photoshop may be the single best emblem of the immense new - and eminently abusable - power conferred on humanity by the digital revolution: With a little will and some patience, virtually anyone can do virtually anything to a photograph. Had the editors so desired, they could have shown Diana painting starbursts on Dodi's chest, with Boris Yeltsin standing right behind them, pinching Diana's butt.
But that's not the type of thing most editors do with Photoshop. What they do is far more subtle and insidious. Take the case of Rebecca Sealfon, winner of this year's United States National Spelling Bee. Naturally, she was elated the moment she won. The Associated Press distributed a photograph of an exuberant teenager screaming for joy and waving her arms in the air. Hanging down in front of her ruffled white blouse was her large entrant placard. It read:
140
Daily News
New York, New York
This meant simply that Sealfon was entrant number 140, and that the New York Daily News was her sponsor for the event.
A curious thing happened, though, when the picture appeared the next day in the New York Post, a Daily News competitor. The "140" was a lot bigger on the placard, and the phrase "Daily News" had vanished.
This excision is so petty and insubstantial, one might convincingly argue that it belongs in the Who Cares file. But I think it's a significant symbol of what photographs are becoming in the wired world, and of the havoc that high-tech editors are already beginning to wreak on the institution of photojournalism.
Clearly, "photofiction," as some call it, is potentially provocative even as an art form (though there is plenty of room for skepticism here too - turning an ordinary photograph into a hallucinatory gallery of disassociated images does not automatically make it art). As a new journalistic tool, though, it is highly suspect. People look to photographs as quasi-objective representations of firsthand data, as a form of verification or proof. As soon as the essential integrity of a photo is undermined, so is the relationship between the news provider and the news consumer.
Obviously, there is no justification for an editor digitally repositioning subjects in order to give the false impression that a kiss or slap or snub is taking place. But I would argue that the manipulation needn't be nearly so flagrant in order to be unethical and damaging. When untidy or unappealing objects are cleaned up or removed, the essence of that photo also quickly disappears. The unspoken contract between the photographer and the viewer is broken. The photo is no longer a glimpse of the scene. It is now an illustration: an interpretation with selective facts, categorized in a particular way, with some details highlighted, many others simply obliterated.
There is no such thing as true objectivity, of course, in photography or any other medium. By its nature, a photograph is an incomplete and therefore slanted picture of reality - a stylized depiction that represents exactly what the photographer wants you to see, and no more. Each photograph is like a story, and we have to remember that behind every story is a storyteller.
It's also worth recalling that conventional photo-manipulation has been around as long as the camera. Cropping alone is a powerful tool, and there are plenty of basic darkroom techniques for removing or altering aspects of any photograph. Surrealist art photographers like Jerry Uelsmann have captivated colleagues and collectors for decades by creatively embedding exotic foreign images into natural landscapes.
Thankfully, though, Uelsmann doesn't try to pass his work off as reality. Nor is he under pressure to spike up sales on the newsstands. But in photo editors' hands, this new digital sandbox threatens to cheapen journalism and even further undermine news consumers' confidence in the media. By making dramatic manipulations simple to effect and difficult to detect, photofiction threatens to exacerbate the climate of distrust.
Fortunately, there's an easy antidote, in the form of a full-disclosure proposal by former New York Times Magazine photo editor Fred Ritchin. Ritchin has developed a new icon, a tiny crossed-out camera lens, which he would like to see affixed to any published photograph with digital alterations.
Whether or not Ritchin's proposal catches on, there is likely to be one beneficial byproduct of the digital poisoning of photojournalism. Sooner or later, the mass consumer audience will catch on to the manipulation, probably through a major celebrity scandal. When they do, consumers will permanently say goodbye to their image-naiveté. A new variety of skepticism will flourish. Critical awareness of photojournalism's subjectivity will spread far and wide.
But let's not allow that to justify the stupidity. If we let the system break down completely, skepticism will yield to destructive cynicism. And if that happens, we will all be sorry. Today, a good picture is worth a thousand words. For the life of me, I can't figure out why we would want to devalue that, and make a picture worth nothing more than a lie.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
