Altering History or Enhancing Reality?

I grew up in a time when we believed that “the camera doesn’t lie.” If you took a photo, then what was printed must be reality. And it has widely been assumed that Photoshop is the demon which has given rise to the practice of altering reality. In fact, neither of those ideas is entirely true because as long as there have been cameras, paper, scissors, glue and paint, there has been photo altering. It’s just easier now.

When I first started in photography using film cameras, what I saw when I was taking the photos often did not match what I saw when I received my prints back from the developer. I experienced a lot of disappointment! Then I learned that a skilled photo processor could make all the difference. He or she could boost the saturation of the photos, or push/pull the exposure, or dodge and burn the shadows and highlights. These were important to me not so that I could alter reality, but so that I could make my photos match what my eyes saw in person. I also discovered that a good airbrush artist could remove a few wrinkles here and there on the finished print, or take out an errant tree, then re-coat the print so no one could tell it had ever been touched.  When I used an airbrush artist I was altering the photo for effect or for perfection, but not really for deception.

Those techniques are minor compared to what some photographers did even as far back as Lincoln’s day, as shown in the 1860 before and after photos below:

Here we have Lincoln’s head pasted onto the body of John Calhoun, a southern politician. It was said that “no sufficiently heroic portrait of Lincoln had yet been taken,” so apparently one needed to be created. Presumably Lincoln’s head was cut from one photograph, carefully pasted onto another one, then the whole thing re-photographed to produce a new negative. To me, this goes beyond perfecting the image. It's more towards the deception end of the scale. More about this photo and other early examples can be found here: DailyMail.com.

Fast forward to February 19, 1990: Adobe Photoshop is released into the world. I do not know what the original intent for Photoshop was, but when I began using it (somewhere around 1998), my intent was to enhance my photos in the same way I had asked my photo processor to do. Instead of having to try to explain what I wanted to someone else and maybe getting that, I now had full control over the finished image. It may have taken a lot of trial and error, and a lot of failure, and a lot of scanning of negatives, but often I got what I wanted. I was a purist at the time so no altering of the subject matter for me!

Yet a mere two years later, I was altering on a grand scale.  I was putting wings on babies, or putting them in teacups, or floating them in clouds. In my defense, I was a new mom and babies were of interest to me. Plus, Anne Geddes was the photographer du jour. And the photos were so patently altered that no one could mistake them for reality!

But altering photos can be a slippery slope, as is striving for perfection. So eventually, since I had the tools anyway, I found myself taking people out of photos who didn't belong there, or putting them in. No worries since these were just family photos and not for publication.  Well, except for the yearbook photos where someone forgot to show up for the photo shoot and I had to add them in later! So no harm, no foul, right? Below is one such example. (And also an example of some not-so-perfect Photoshopping.)

But what about photojournalists?  Do we hold them to a higher standard? I think generally the answer is yes. We trust them to show us reality "as shot," not an interpretation thereof. So it is surprising when we see a photo in a reputable publication and later find out that it has been altered. Some photojournalists have been fired for altering their photos, even just to give a better sense of what the reality was. You can read about one such instance here: "Ease of Alteration Creates Woes for Picture Editors." Yet others have not been punished for even greater infractions.

In this photo, it was the publication itself that requested the change for religious reasons:

In this iconic photo of the President Obama national security team watching the raid that killed Osama bin Laden from the White House Situation Room, the Hasidic newspaper Der Tziung removed the images of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and counterterrorism directory Audrey Tomason from the photo because of their policy of never printing photos of women in its pages. The newspaper later apologized, sort of. More about this photo here: TheGuardian.com.

For me, the example below definitely crosses the line, especially since the publication defended it's choice to Photoshop someone out. And it's even on the cover of the magazine! It seems deceptive to me and it changes the essence of this photo of President Obama surveying the BP oil spill along the Louisiana coast.  Here are the after and before:

The Economist deputy editor Emma Duncan said, "I asked for Ms. Randolph to be removed because I wanted readers to focus on Mr. Obama, not because I wanted to make him look isolated." Source: The Huffington Post. And yet, that's exactly what she did.