Fragility of the Image: Tom Ang on Image Manipulation, April 2008 /

Photography has always claimed more than it could deliver in terms of its ability to be a true record of the seen, confidently claiming its objectivity to be unassailable, appropriating for itself an independence and reliability as observer and recorder with an arrogance that brooked no question. Truly it is the best witness we have for the past, certainly the most potent token for recording the present, and – by far – the most concise scheme for compressing information for future use. Furthermore, photography is also the most open of systems: readable independently of language, sex, age and race; and easily interpreted by virtually all cultures, religions and ideologies.

Fifth generation

Photography is now well into its fifth, and most effervescent era of technical development. The first era after the birth of photography was the industrialisation of the photographic process in 1888 by George Eastman who democratisation what was previously the preserve of the leisured wealthy. The next era in photography’s development was the introduction of a practical method of recording colour images through the Lumière Brothers’ invention of Autochrome, a true expansion of the visual language available to photography.

The third great era of photography was ushered in by the miniaturisation of the film, camera and all its mechanics as demonstrated by Oskar Barnack in 1913 and put into production as the Leica in 1925. The camera showed that ultra-miniaturisation 2 was practicable on an industrial scale. But, more importantly, the compact and discrete camera – a technological leap equivalent to super-human athletic powers – also stimulated a tremendous jump forward in creativity in photography, single-handedly ushering the golden age of photojournalism.

The fourth era and a logical elaboration of the third was the use of micro-electronics to control camera functions heralded by the Canon AE-1 of 1976 which showed that ‘affordable quality’ was not an oxymoron: it was another major step towards the democratisation of photographic practice, now reaching its zenith as the fifth era progresses.

And the fifth, photographically the most volatile era of all, is of course, ours – the digital.

Digital Omniprescence

The scene before us is almost an absurdly fantastic advance on what was a faltering start. We’re not astonished because we’re right in the middle of it. But let me sketch a few broad strokes. Digital cameras can be found in just about every household in Europe – the region with the highest market penetration. And if you spread out the households owning more than one camera to the others, essentially every household has a digital camera. And if you add cell-phone cameras, the coverage is even more dense. Don’t forget that the company selling the largest number of cameras – and by a very long chalk – is a cell-phone manufacturer. Nokia has nearly 40% of the market share world-wide and expects to sell over 200 million camera phones this year.

As a result, it’s a safe guess that more digital images are now captured each year than in the entire history of analogue photography put together. Here’s another result: by visiting just two web-sites you can access over a billion images. If you are willing to spend just one or two dollars for royalty-free rights as many as ten million images are available only a few mouse-clicks away.

Let us consider these images which are on public view, offered for public use or for publication. Let us imagine we could compare the images we see on the World Wide Web with the original images. I will risk another guess: that we would see that the vast majority of images were not placed on the Web without first having been opened and adjusted.

A measure of the culture of image manipulation is that even the suggestion that images are not first opened and manipulated before being used sounds mildly preposterous. Who on this planet uses an image without first opening it? And how many photographers refrain completely from making any adjustment or refinement to an image once opened? Manipulating an image is now so much part of our life that ‘to Photoshop’ is a verb that all, even non-photographers, recognise.

Measure of truth

It is simplistic and naive to concentrate on the image itself, reserving it as the only measure for truthfulness, a self-referential test of veracity (although in a purely technical sense, digital forensics can prove that an image has been manipulated). An integral part of the modus vivendi for today’s photography is our acceptance of a relativism consequent upon the context of an image’s use. It is not controversial that where a photograph is used as part of a work of creative fine art or as the basis for computergenerated imagery, any amount of image manipulation that is needed is acceptable.

At the polar opposite is the photograph used to report news, to document a social or environmental story. Here we expect, we rightly demand, the highest standards of veracity, meaning minimal, photographic-level – equivalent to ‘dark-room’ – enhancement and a zero tolerance for the alteration of content.

In between, there lies the ground where manipulation of fashion, advertising, or portrait images may be appropriate provided certain limits – conveniently hazy and ill-defined – are not exceeded. One day it is industry-wide practice to make fashion models look thin and skinny, another day a back-lash against anorexic role models (demonstrated, for example, by impending new legislation in France) forces a 180° dislocation of the boundaries: it becomes hip to manipulate fashion models to look more curvaceous, with full breasts.

The danger in the sin of manipulation is not that it cannot be found, expunged and punished, but in the near-certainty of its growth. The corrupting influence of image manipulation can alloy otherwise pure practice. The danger is in the transit of the acceptability of manipulation from one category of image use to another. This particular slippery slope is well greased, full of overactive enthusiast having fun and very steep.

Should we be concerned?

To the extent that today’s news are the notes for tomorrow’s history, today’s photographs are the foundations of tomorrow’s archives. A photographic record is in essence a verbatim report: its start and end are the result of arbitrary or pre-directed selection, but within that frame, it is word-for-word accurate. The photograph in its primitive, un-manipulated state is, equivalently, in one-to-one correspondence with the subject: that is a crucial relationship, vital to integrity of the system. Tamper with that correspondence by, for example, removing an item from the image or adding a new item from another subject, and its core strength of veracity is blown wide open to question.

And when a photograph’s veracity is called into question it loses its all value as a record. No longer trustworthy, it becomes a centre for mistrust; it attracts the wrong kind of attention – the difference between looking on a face with love, or watching a lover for signs of infidelity. The result is to disempower the image: no longer able to bear any burden of proof, it becomes, at best, a pretty image – a pretty useless image.

Fragile medium

Digitisation is the culpable process because it has, above all, rendered the formerly sturdy medium of photography into a profoundly fragile one. In the transformation from a singledirection, person-to-person token of visual exchange into a multiple-direction, anyone-to-anyone else in the world medium of data exchange, it has become irreparably fragmented, splintered into millions of pieces. Indeed, digitisation is fundamentally a process of fragmentation. But the process is more than merely a dissection into constituent parts. The break-up is of the actual fabric of the image because the process, of necessity, has – it must – to destroy meaning – or at least its noetic content – (the meaning that it has for us) – in order to digest the image into components that make sense to the computer. This digestion of the image through the guts of the digital pipeline inevitably strips it of all its individuality, causing all digital images to be essentially identical because there is no human-meaningful way to distinguish between them.

At the same time the contextual framework for reading an image’s meaning and the infrastructural basis of an image’s genesis – these must be abandoned because they form no part of, and are indeed wholly irrelevant to, digitisation. We are forced to rely on nonimage substitutes such as verbal tags and metadata to re-clothe our images with individuality. But we have to admit we thereby recover only the rags and tatters of an image’s being.

The reason we must take this route with the digital image is that not only is the image itself fragmented, its identity is multiply splintered by digitisation; it takes on a poly-polar personality, one that can shift wildly between radically different states of being. Without the physical presence of the print to define a physically constrained identity, a trillion digital images can be identical in every precise, exact, every last detail. They are in both superficial respect and in pure essence the same thing. This becomes clear when we realise it does not even make sense to nominate one as a copy of another, since that presumes that the copied precedes the copy. But we are never in a position, simply by looking at the image, to determine precedence -; temporal, physical or digital. In fact, we have to rely on meta-knowledge in the event we happen 5 to be present at the act of reproduction or by looking at temporal data embedded in the image.

Therefore all identical images are individually existent. Individual image identity has exploded into a trillion parts, each able to reproduce to produce another trillion identities. By the same, but scary, token, once a false, manipulated image is created, it can be multiplied without control. And every image will be without any indication that its link to truth is one that has been severed.

The untidiness of truth

The temptations to fabricate are many. For the truth can be inconvenient. The truth can be untidy. The truth can be unglamorous. And the truth can rudely render useless months of work.

The examples are many and start as early as 1863 with the fabrications which litter Alexander Gardner’s coverage of the American Civil War. It has been shown that not only did he move bodies into shot (because there were inconveniently too few and scattered, so he also arrange for the same bodies to represent opposite sides of the battle), he also introduced his own props into pictures. There’s more: he also fabricated names of locations to make them sound more romantic and falsified captions to help sell more prints. More recent examples have multiplied alarmingly in the last few years – from the Walski cover for the LA Times to the deceptions of Allan Detrich and the clumsy retouching of video stills by the London Evening Standard.

A single dodgy image, such as that of augmented smoke over Lebanon created by Adnan Hajj for Reuters, is said to have caused his entire archive with the wire service – some thousand images – to be removed from file. Doubtless in that collection are hundreds of entirely unmanipulated images, a invaluable record of conflict in the Middle East. But that one image has infected the others; the bad coffee bean means you have to throw out the whole sack. And that is a great, and sad, penalty to have to pay for what was an entirely unnecessary manipulation.

The photographer’s reputation in ruins is sufficient tragedy, but what of the reputation of photography itself? Each photographer in disgrace sends another shockwave through the foundation of photography. It took years for the august guardian of a onceimpeccable reputation for journalistic integrity – National Geographic – to recover from the scandal of the Moved Pyramids. And maybe they haven’t recovered; look, we are still talking about it. And there will be always the shadow of a suspicion that National Geographic may try the same trick again, only next time, they’ll have learnt their lesson and will be clever enough not to 6 make changes to a subject that, like the Pyramid, has been measured down to the last millimetre.

Hammer blows

Every manipulation uncovered in newspapers, magazines, web sites and public relations communications is a hammer-blow to the standing of journalism and photography. The primacy of seeing is what we hold dear; the purity of visual perception is what we, as photographers, study, strive, work and live for and which in turn supports us. It is only from the preservation of visual purity that we can obtain the sense of truth in photography in which we vitally and essentially put our trust. Truth in photography is the piercing light put out by the incontrovertible (if I may borrow Milan Kundera’s definition of ‘beauty in art’). We strive for and respond deeply whenever we encounter a visual record that glows indisputably, indubitably and unquestionably true. Our love is the image. Know that if this era of the digital image, it is the era of the Fragile Image and it will not take our weight if its corroded. Truth is under-valued, and some may even despise it as weakness, but it is all that we have, as photographers and as human beings. The axis of a weak truth and fragile image leads to a down-ward spiral. While the future lies in all our hands, the baton of photography is passing into the hands of today’s young, student and rising photographers. They are tomorrow’s guardians of the Fragile Image.

My prayer: May they do a better job than we have!

Visuals / Essays / Tom Ang