Spent a little time today working on the workshop I’ll be giving at DragonCon, entitled “Photographic Truth, Myth of.”
There are many thoughts that I’m trying to see if I can work into the conversation. While I was talking to Liz Galindorf about this, we got into a heated discussion about the validity of digital manipulation. Liz suggested that while digital manipulation is a useful skill to know, it is not generally needed. I, on the other hand, argue that the very act of photography is already a manipulation, and so you have a duty to finish manipulating it until it achieves your intention.
I hadn’t thought initially to include an argument for performing manipulations in the first place, but it seems like a good thing to include.
It seems to me that the first question we should ask is, “Why are you taking a photograph?” Why not draw it in pencil? Or paint it? Or record it as video? When the daguerreotype was first invented, it’s appeal was the degree of realism which it rendered. As additional technologies were developed which rendered a photographic image, the one which allowed for the greatest ease of reproducibility has consistently been the technology which became primary over other techniques. From the daguerrotype to the platinum print to the palladium print to the salt print, and all the way to the digital image. Another choice which has driven photographic methods has been portability. The civil war was photographed with cameras as large as a man which took ten minutes to set up. The most popular modern camera is so small it fits inside a device that has absolutely no relationship to visual imaging.
Are you taking photographs because you want to create images which are the easiest to share with others? Because it’s more portable than an easel, canvas and paintbrush? Because it is easier? Faster?
While there are many possible answers to that question, I think I could safely suggest that regardless of your “default” answer, that reason changes with each image you create. If that’s the case, then it stands to reason that there are times when “precisely recreating the scene as it was laid out” is not high on your agenda.
In those images whose purpose is other than attempting to reveal a “photographic truth” (a term I still think presumes far too much), why would we limit ourselves by what was laid out before us? It is a restraint we lay upon ourselves because we have a false belief in the inherent inviolability of the tool we have chosen to use.
This dovetails nicely into my original starting point, which is that when you make the effort of taking a photograph, you have limited your audience’s perception of the scene to only what is in the picture. The viewer assumes that you intended to make this image, and therefore supposes that every element of the image was intentional.
This, I think, is a strong argument for performing digital image manipulation.
