Project 4: Reality and Intervention - Preamble

The next section of the course is about the manipulation of images to in some way change ‘reality’. Before embarking on this section, I thought that I might set down my current views so that I could see whether they change as a result of studying the course material.

I am not one of those people who believe that ‘the camera doesn’t lie’. Even if once I may have thought so, my study of photography (and attendance at Camera Clubs!) would have disabused me of this notion. The choice, framing and composition of images and the use of a wide variety of digital software available make it clear that final images may bear little resemblance to reality.

Does this matter? It is possible to manipulate images in many ways but, for me, the only unethical use of manipulation occurs where an image, which purports to be factual, has been manipulated in such a way that the viewer is misled for mischievous purposes. I am thinking here of published ‘news’ photographs which aim to indicate something which hasn’t happened rather than (say) cloning a threatening sky from one photograph onto another to make a more striking image. In the latter case, although the photographer wants to mislead the viewer into thinking that the image shown was ‘reality’, it is not done for mischievous purposes but as a way of improving an image by computer-aided manipulation rather than photographic skills.


Some touching up can be unethical, however, as in the recent furore about a cosmetic company digitally enhancing a portrait of a woman's face while claiming that the 'improvement' was as a result of their face-cream!

There is another class of image, which I will call ‘photographic art’, where the purpose is to use an image, or set of images, and combine them in such a way that something new and striking is produced by juxtaposition of images, colour effects etc. The viewer is in no way misled as the manipulation is so obvious and, indeed, the very purpose of the exercise.

The last section of this course was about ‘Monochrome’ and how colour images could be processed to convey the photographers’ vision when he/she took  the shot in the first place. Before the advent of colour film – when there was no choice but to take images in black and white and the viewing public were more likely to accept this as ‘reality’ - the final black and white image was still affected by the photographers’ control of the developing process and, therefore, manipulated to his or her vision. I suspect, however, that there was an aim to produce images as realistically as possible (and before the advent of digital it was much harder to manipulate images in any case).

So why bother with producing black and white images? After the advent of colour, and certainly today, anyone choosing to take images in black and white must be doing so, in my view, in order to show their version of reality (because reality is in colour, not black and white). Furthermore, as ‘reality’ is in colour – and images can be produced these days in colour- the viewing public nowadays are likely to be less convinced of the reality of a black and white image compared to the days when colour photography was not available. This is because they are used to seeing colour images as ‘the norm’ and, indeed, many people fail to understand the reason for taking black and white photographs at all, now that colour image production is available. I have seen discussions (on the OCA forum amongst other places) about whether black and white photography is dead.

The course material in section 3 shows many ways of manipulating a colour  image (using the various software available, be it Photoshop, Lightroom, Silver Effex Pro 2 etc) in order to enhance, emphasise or subdue etc parts of the image to achieve, in black and white, what the photographer wants to convey. Indeed, there can be several different interpretations of the same colour image to produce different effects. In my view, all these types of ‘manipulation of reality’ are acceptable as the very fact of producing a black and white image in the first place, implies that the viewer should be wary of treating what he/she sees as ‘reality’. However, there are some types of manipulation e.g. removing or adding items etc, which can be unacceptable, even in a black and white image, where truth is being compromised.

Manipulation of colour images to be shown as colour images is a more difficult area as many people automatically perceive a colour image as being ‘realistic’. There are certain manipulations which I find acceptable, like use of the basic exposure/white balance/contrast/saturation type settings and also some tidying up of an image to remove an unwanted object - as long as the removal does not compromise the fundamental reality of the photograph e.g. removing a figure from a group shot. Examples of ‘tidying up’ might include removing dust spots, small items which take the eye away from the main subject, figures from an architectural scene in order to produce a clean image.

What is not acceptable, in my opinion, is the adding of items to an image e.g. figures or objects. This may be done for reasons of composition (rather that something more devious like changing a news photograph) but I don’t like it. It seems to cross the line between manipulating what is captured by the camera and producing a new version of reality. The exception to this, of course, is the 'photographic art' type images mentioned above which require obvious manipulation to produce new and (hopefully) interesting effects.

So; some initial thoughts. On with the course……………………….