Thankfully indeed.
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A Commentary on Photo Legitimacy
- Thread starter M Hamilton
- Start date
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Vlad S
Senior Member
Reproducibility is one of the cornerstones of the scientific method. For exampe, if removing the red channel in an RGB image makes details more visible by, say, reducing the noise, then this process can be applied consistently with the same expected result every time. And even though the coloration would be different from what a human eye would see, there is still a definite and objective correspondence between the reality and the photograph.
If on the other hand, one considers a print obtained with the mordançage technique, then any "evidence" in it can be just a random fluke, and there is no definite correspondence between the circumstances and the photograph.
Vlad
M Hamilton
Leading Member
Legally speaking, what alterations would cause a photo to become illegitimate?
I think one must have some stance. HCB had one in common with other photojournalists at Magnum. To alter reality as little as possible. However HCB preferred B&W, as an abstraction. Sometimes he slightly corrected the frame, but that was it.
He also gives a reason, The click is about time, once the subject is gone, the picture is dead. He must have found PP extremely boring, something that prevented him enjoying life, that fleeting moment of joy - or so I understood.
And yet he was also a painter, a friend of other painters. He explained to Braque, that a shot was like applying a patch of yellow to a canvas. Why would a painter do it? The act of seeing can take a long time, but a shot is just a second, a happy intuition. Why would one want to spoil that?
For the same reason he used only one camera and one lens. The camera must be an extension of the eye, he said.
Am.
sean000
Veteran Member
What about surrealism? Even in photography some of us process images in such a way to make them look unnatural and heavily stylized. Then there are photographers who create scenes to capture that are deliberately surreal... Cindy Sherman for example.
Max Jerrell
Member
not taking photographs but by producing images.
M Hamilton
Leading Member
A Commentary on Photo Legitimacy
Yesterday I posed a question on DPreview.com's forums. To get a well rounded answer I posted in the m4/3 forum (the forum I most actively pa...
mitchellhamilton.blogspot.ca
scott_mcleod
Senior Member
In my opinion (FWIW):
- if you add or subtract something (i.e. an object (information), not noise) that was not present when the image was captured
- if you change the shape of an object
- if you change the relative size of an object
- if you change the relative color of an object
then you no longer have a "directly photographed image" of a real scene that actually existed when the capture was made.
Note that point 1 above would allow fixing defects such as hot/dead pixels in a digital image or scratches or dust in a scanned film image.
Burning and dodging either optically or digitally is fine up to a point because it can better represent how we perceived the scene at the time due to how the human visual system functions.
Extreme HDR with haloes on the other hand is just weird and I do not think anyone is going to be fooled into thinking that's what "reality" looked like (drugs notwithstanding
)
Note also that just the simple act of framing (not even cropping) can alter the "story" if that's where you're coming from. To use a banal example, I shot a photo in YNP of a "lonely bison" grazing in a pasture. Except that his/her pals were just out of the frame and could not be included in a pleasing way from where I was standing; they were there moments before but wandered off and I was unable to get the shot I wanted because of some jerk standing in front of me who was chimping, and it was an unstable slope with nowhere else to go. So I ended up taking a photo with a different "mood" due to circumstances beyond my control.
I have no idea if this is the sort of thing you are after - I haven't read the rest of this thread to avoid being influenced in my response.
Regards,
Scott
- if you add or subtract something (i.e. an object (information), not noise) that was not present when the image was captured
- if you change the shape of an object
- if you change the relative size of an object
- if you change the relative color of an object
then you no longer have a "directly photographed image" of a real scene that actually existed when the capture was made.
Note that point 1 above would allow fixing defects such as hot/dead pixels in a digital image or scratches or dust in a scanned film image.
Burning and dodging either optically or digitally is fine up to a point because it can better represent how we perceived the scene at the time due to how the human visual system functions.
Extreme HDR with haloes on the other hand is just weird and I do not think anyone is going to be fooled into thinking that's what "reality" looked like (drugs notwithstanding
)Note also that just the simple act of framing (not even cropping) can alter the "story" if that's where you're coming from. To use a banal example, I shot a photo in YNP of a "lonely bison" grazing in a pasture. Except that his/her pals were just out of the frame and could not be included in a pleasing way from where I was standing; they were there moments before but wandered off and I was unable to get the shot I wanted because of some jerk standing in front of me who was chimping, and it was an unstable slope with nowhere else to go. So I ended up taking a photo with a different "mood" due to circumstances beyond my control.
I have no idea if this is the sort of thing you are after - I haven't read the rest of this thread to avoid being influenced in my response.
Regards,
Scott
Vlad S
Senior Member
Somebody may agree or disagree with your position, but as analysis I think it's lacking. It is clearly written from a disapproving point of view, it's loaded with negative connotations, and it does not answer the posed question: how much is too much. It also does not really offer a definition of "legitimacy." It's pretty much thinly veiled bashing of an undefined property.
Vlad
Vlad
imabel
Leading Member
Photography art manupulation is no different than music interpretation on an original score, nor a painters interpretation of any object as they visulize it and put it on canvas.
The following URL kind of sums up the question of photography as an art form:
Mike
The following URL kind of sums up the question of photography as an art form:
Mike
absentaneous
Leading Member
the answer is simple. it depends on the use of the photo. if you are a photo journalist then photo manipulation is of course out of the question. if you are an artist then only the sky is the limit. everything else sits somewhere in between.
Frank Hurley was one of the first to manipulate photos at the turn of the century. He was the photog on the imfamous shackletons antarctic expo.
but returned from that to be a WW1 photo. he composed photos in the darkroom from a number of negs. such as the trenches from one, bomb from another and clouds and planes from another.
The difference with those was the prints are truely one of a kind and not directly repeatable. true art prints.
i dont really have a problem with it provided it is clear as to what it is. i.e. not trying to pass off something as something else. but good manipulation is an art form. but you cant really ever make up for bad images to start with.
but returned from that to be a WW1 photo. he composed photos in the darkroom from a number of negs. such as the trenches from one, bomb from another and clouds and planes from another.
The difference with those was the prints are truely one of a kind and not directly repeatable. true art prints.
i dont really have a problem with it provided it is clear as to what it is. i.e. not trying to pass off something as something else. but good manipulation is an art form. but you cant really ever make up for bad images to start with.
I personally like National Geographic's standards, or something along the lines of Smithsonian: Minimal post work, burning and dodging and slight color adjustments. These standards keep us working hard to get good images and seem honest to me.
It is my same stance. With the pretext of Visual Art one could do any PP, but a close relationship with what one sees, is a specific aim to photography.
Am.
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Mike Fewster
Forum Pro
Vlad's point nailed it. It is no different to painting or sketching. The work of a court or police artist, pre photography would be judged on entirely different criteria to that used in discussing the work of a landscape artist. traditional botanical artists rearrange reality for the purpose of accurately recording particular details that are relevant to their purposes but don't necessarily represent "reality" in the real world. But they are all "legitimate" artists.
There is no "objective reality" in perception or the creation/capture of an image. Every imgs involves choices on the part of the maker of the image and the materials/technology they have used. Take dof and bokeh and colour. Viewing the same scene, what the individual perceives will vary from one to another. Our eyes vary in performance from individual to individual. We dont all see the same scene st the same f stop and so dof and bokeh is not fixed. We take photos at f stops that are not those that a human eye would have selected on many scenes. And we know that individual perception of colour varies markedly between individuals. We know that different species see in different wavelengths.
Therefore, if we wish to weigh the legitimacy of a photography, we need first to define the purpose of that photograph. Consider a recently discovered long lost photograph that shows John Wilkes leaping between the figure of Abe Lincoln and a gun just seen emerging from behind a curtain. Is the purpose of the photo an attempt to have us reconsider those events or is it a great, but staged, shot. The legitimacy or otherwise of the photo depends on what we believe to be the purpose of the photo
There is no "objective reality" in perception or the creation/capture of an image. Every imgs involves choices on the part of the maker of the image and the materials/technology they have used. Take dof and bokeh and colour. Viewing the same scene, what the individual perceives will vary from one to another. Our eyes vary in performance from individual to individual. We dont all see the same scene st the same f stop and so dof and bokeh is not fixed. We take photos at f stops that are not those that a human eye would have selected on many scenes. And we know that individual perception of colour varies markedly between individuals. We know that different species see in different wavelengths.
Therefore, if we wish to weigh the legitimacy of a photography, we need first to define the purpose of that photograph. Consider a recently discovered long lost photograph that shows John Wilkes leaping between the figure of Abe Lincoln and a gun just seen emerging from behind a curtain. Is the purpose of the photo an attempt to have us reconsider those events or is it a great, but staged, shot. The legitimacy or otherwise of the photo depends on what we believe to be the purpose of the photo
Surely a photograph would be legitimate if (even theoretically) a significant proportion of people viewing the event would claim the photograph it to be a true and accurate record of that event within the limit of the medium and any post processing (if a digital image). This would be in much the same way that a sketch of a person in court or a a painted portrait could lay claim to be legitimate. Past this point some recognition would need to be made of any processing in order to keep that legitimacy, eg false colour imaging of satellite maps to show land height, lowering the pitch of bats sonar so we can hear them. If you can't (or won't) point to an acceptable (by the majority) post processing technique that preserves the data in the image then it must be art, and anything goes. My point on preserving the data (and hence legitimacy) relates to showing it in a form other than which it was recorded (the RAW file or OOC jpeg with no settings, the satellite image, the sound recording of the bast) but from which the original could be reconstructed. So a picture of a model where the outline has been "thinned" would not be legitimate as there is no way to recover her/his original shape but the frequency of the audible bat recordings could be made higher again to reflect their true sound.
DelK
Well-known member
Thre really needed to be a definiton of legitimacy. To many of the responders, legitimacy variously means honesty, faithful to original, unaltered, unadulterated, accurate, modified only by a specific and deterministic method or transform, useful. The existence of the opposite of any or all of these in a photograph does not make it not a photograph. Until there is an agreed definition of legitimacy, there can be no discussion of legitimacy. Further, the development of this definition and the discussion of how it is applied are both non-sensical in the context of photography. Let's go make photos and then modify them to the extent that we like to meet our individual purposes.
CharlesB58
Forum Pro
As has been mentioned, the genre and intent of the photo has a lot to do with whether and how much PP affects legitimacy.
Yet is any photo truly "legitimate" as some would define it: that is, portraying reality in as realistic and "truthful" a way as possible? The problem is we make subjective choices even before we make the capture.
The photographer's choice of focal length, aperture, shutter speed, framing, position relative to the subject, and even the moment of capture all introduce subjective choices which can be argued reduce the legitimacy of any photo. Perhaps catalog or forensic photography, which tend to follow standardized processes, are the only truly "legitimate" photos.
Recently in the US three versions of the same photo of a suspected Iraqi terrorist in custody of US troops made the rounds. One crop made it look like a soldier was about to shoot the man, who was on his knees, hands bound. Another crop showed a medic offering the man a canteen of water. The original frame showed both. It turned out the crop which made it look like a soldier was about to shoot the suspect left out the fact that the soldier was merely holding his weapon in a lowered position and he was looking away from the suspect while the medic approached to offer him water.
So, it didn't take much PP to put the legitimacy of the versions seen through different sources into question. However, this sort of selective cropping-sometimes done at the moment of capture-has long occurred in photojournalism circles.
It's analogous to literature, with fiction and non fiction.
Both tell truths in differing ways.
When I started in digital, I went crazy at PP. Sometimes do it for just the fun of it still. But my most satisfying photographs are those taken without cropping, without much even in the way of adjustment (although sometimes a person has to..the tones, exposure need some fixing). To freeze the truth of what is seen..that brief moment is the strength of photography...and really, really hard to do well...taking all - everything into account at that click (I wished I was better at it). All the rest can be painted if one takes the time to learn it.
Both tell truths in differing ways.
When I started in digital, I went crazy at PP. Sometimes do it for just the fun of it still. But my most satisfying photographs are those taken without cropping, without much even in the way of adjustment (although sometimes a person has to..the tones, exposure need some fixing). To freeze the truth of what is seen..that brief moment is the strength of photography...and really, really hard to do well...taking all - everything into account at that click (I wished I was better at it). All the rest can be painted if one takes the time to learn it.
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There are images that were shot on film and manipulated in a darkroom that are every bit as "unreal" as anything I've seen out of Photoshop. It's art, and it's up to the artist to decide what is "legitimate."
The only thing, IMHO, that makes a photo illegitimate is if it purports to be something other than it is. In other words, if it's a lie. I'm not opposed to images that represent something that didn't really exist, as long as the artist is honest about it. But if the artist inserts something into a photo that wasn't really there, and tells us it's real, that's illegitimate. The Soviets were famous for this, even before digital. The Chinese and North Korean governments are famous for it now, as are many of the tabloids in the grocery store checkout line.
The only thing, IMHO, that makes a photo illegitimate is if it purports to be something other than it is. In other words, if it's a lie. I'm not opposed to images that represent something that didn't really exist, as long as the artist is honest about it. But if the artist inserts something into a photo that wasn't really there, and tells us it's real, that's illegitimate. The Soviets were famous for this, even before digital. The Chinese and North Korean governments are famous for it now, as are many of the tabloids in the grocery store checkout line.
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