● Does digital technology change how we see photography as truth?
In the era of “Fake News”, a term I had never heard of before President Trump, I have to admit I am always a little wary of what I am looking at, particularly when it comes to news articles. That’s not to say I agree with him at all. Quite the contrary. Trump felt threatened by a free press that holds power to account and so it should. We only have to look to countries like Russia or North Korea to see what happens when a free press does not exist. I want to believe what I am seeing to be real, but there is always a small thought at the back of my mind hoping that it is but also just sitting there going, is this photo taken from elsewhere, or a long time ago in another conflict, or has it been edited in some way in order to strengthen the viewpoint of the source. I’m focusing on a news perspective as of now as we are currently being bombarded with imagery of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and there have already been discussions of imagery surrounding the war that is incorrect. Images of warplanes taken from other sources years ago and incorrectly appropriated. When I saw this it reminded me of a news report years back where a news channel had used a screengrab of a video game called Battlefield given how realistic video game graphics have gotten.
Digital technology has certainly made it very easy to edit photographs with Wells pointing out (Wells, 2015) “manipulation of images is nothing new and that photographs have been changed, touched-up or distorted since the earliest days”, and she goes on later to say “it is interesting to note that we have always known that photographs are malleable, contrived and slippery, but have, simultaneously, been prepared to believe them to be evidential and more ‘real’ than other kinds of images”.
She later says that a “complex of technical, political, social and cultural changes has transformed not just photography, but the whole of visual culture”. This gets me thinking about the rise of advertising. Was photography not used heavily in order to help produce the modern consumer creating “wants” as opposed to simply “needs”. Does any of this really answer the main question though? I don’t think it necessarily does. If we have always known that imagery could be manipulated then digital has simply made the process more versatile, although now this makes me think about Flat Earther’s who have questioned both analogue technologies like the famous photos taken of Earth by Apollo on its way to the moon, and modern imagery taken from the ISS both in photographic and video forms. This is of course a fringe group of individuals and hardly makes up the general consensus but when both can be questioned in this way it makes digital technology less unique. For people with these views, photography can be questioned regardless of its form if it does not support their worldview.
In Stephen Bull’s book Photography, he discusses the 1995 essay by Lev Manovichwho reinforces the point made by Wells that photography was manipulated from the very beginning stating (Bull, 2010) “photographs were cut-up, combined and reassembled from the moment that photography came into being, for example in the cut-and-paste techniques of the Victorian photo album and the 19th-century montages by Oscar Rejlander such as The Two ways of Life which combines 30 separate images.” He quotes Manovich as saying “Digital technology does not subvert ‘normal’ photography because ‘normal’ photography never existed.” (Manovich 2003: 245). He later goes on to say that Batchen goes further than Manovich by arguing in 1997 that “even ‘normal’ documentary photography involves practices of artifice such as cropping, the use of flash and selecting an exposure time: ‘In the mere act of transcribing world into picture, three dimensions into two, photographers necessarily manufacture the image they make’ (Batchen 1997: 212). To Batchen digitally manipulated photographs do what photography has always done: depict the world as an altered version of itself. From such viewpoints digital technology can be regarded not as representing a revolution, but as a gradual and continuing evolution in photography – and how it is thought about – since the early 1990s.
Sources
- Wells, L. (2015). Photography a critical introduction. London [U.A] Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
- Bull, S. (2010). Photography. London ; New York: Routledge.
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