the ethics of digital photo manipulation

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What Is Photo Manipulation, Really? Article by allychevalier (20,726 pts ) Edited & published by Rhonda Callow (76,002 pts ) on Jun 9, 2009 See More Abo ut: Photo Editing Software Red Eye Photo Editing Photo manipulation is everyday in the digital age... but what precisely is photo manipulation? What does it entail, what are the types and uses? This article outlines the basic definition of photo manipulation. Introduction In the digital age, photo manipulation seems absolutely everyday, yet it is a commonly misunderstood and misrepresented topic. This article outlines the types of photo manipulation, its uses, and what precisely it means for an image to be photo manipulated. The Medium of Photo Manipulation Virtually any image format can be manipulated, though some image formats are certainly more popular for purposes of photo manipulation. Most digital cameras as their default shoot JPGs, making it probably the most used format for the subsequent photo manipulation. However, many photographers prefer to shoot in RAW format if they plan on manipulating the image, due to the higher quality. While this article will focus on the manipulation of digital photos, photo manipulation has been a part of photography since its very genesis. In the dark room, many a political photograph was doctored through a very time intensive process. The digital age brought digital cameras and digital cameras have the advantage of creating, well, digital images. Of course, the sophistication of today's photo manipulation techniques may also be applied to old film negatives, once appropriately scanned .

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Page 1: The Ethics of Digital Photo Manipulation

What Is Photo Manipulation, Really? Article by  allychevalier (20,726 pts ) Edited & published by Rhonda Callow (76,002 pts ) on Jun 9, 2009

See More About: Photo Editing Software Red Eye Photo Editing

Photo manipulation is everyday in the digital age... but what precisely is photo manipulation? What does it entail, what are the types and uses? This article outlines the basic

definition of photo manipulation. Introduction

In the digital age, photo manipulation seems absolutely everyday, yet it is a commonly misunderstood and misrepresented topic. This article outlines the types of photo manipulation, its uses, and what precisely it means for an image to be photo manipulated.

The Medium of Photo Manipulation

Virtually any image format can be manipulated, though some image formats are certainly more popular for purposes of photo manipulation. Most digital cameras as their default shoot JPGs, making it probably the most used format for the subsequent photo manipulation. However, many photographers prefer to shoot in RAW format if they plan on manipulating the image, due to the higher quality.

While this article will focus on the manipulation of digital photos, photo manipulation has been a part of photography since its very genesis. In the dark room, many a political photograph was doctored through a very time intensive process. The digital age brought digital cameras and digital cameras have the advantage of creating, well, digital images.

Of course, the sophistication of today's photo manipulation techniques may also be applied to old film negatives, once appropriately scanned.

Photo "Editing" versus "Manipulation"

Of course, many people don't think of what they do as photo manipulation, rather, as photo editing. While any change to a photo technically qualifies as photo manipulation, this is a common distinction to make.

Photo “editing” generally consists of smaller changes that do not change the image in any fundamental way. Virtually all digital photographers partake in this sort of photo manipulation, from removing red eye to adjusting curves to playing with color balances. Sometimes, it's that the photographer made a mistake composing the shot and the manipulation is just to fix it, to straighten a crooked horizon or to lighten an underexposed photograph. Others, it's to increase the aesthetic qualities of a photo, to saturate the colors of a sunset or to remove a distracting branch from a skyscape. No intention to deceive, only to please.

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Where precisely this crosses over into what is more popularly considered photo “manipulation” is a subjective line, one that varies greatly by photographer. Generally speaking, photo manipulation is when you have conglomerations of multiple photos, or if the photo has been changed beyond reasonable recognition.

Photo manipulation is done for a number of purposes. More infamously, it is for political or sensational purposes. Notorious examples of this vary from a “blacker” version of OJ Simpson's mugshot to Soviets erasing political figures from photographs once they fell out of favor. Indeed, the first known case of photo manipulation is one of Abraham Lincoln made to look a bit more trim.

However, photo manipulation is also an art form in its own right. Fire spirits, literal lionfish, a little boy fishing on a crescent moon, all are examples of high amounts of photo manipulation as fine art. Beautiful and foreign images may be created from the familiar, and the techniques involved in doing so require every bit as much skill as photography proper.

Manipulation With What?

The tools for photo manipulation are many; here's an overview of what's available.

Older film-based cameras had many dark room techniques for manipulating photos, involving actual physical changes to the negative. Everything from acids to pins were utilized in what was often a time consuming process. To this day, even, there are people who swear by this process, relishing in the intimacy with the image that the dark room provides.

But back to the digital age. With today's sophisticated digital cameras, there is a substantial amount of manipulation that happens even as the shutter whirs, from automatic red eye removal to contrast adjustments to color filters. Some deep-diving into your individual camera manual is required to see how many such features are available on your camera—and how many are default without you even knowing it.

After the image is downloaded onto a computer, the options are numerous. The software varies from expensive professional options such as the famous Photoshop (hence “photoshopping”) and affordable photo editing programs to free, open source programs such as GIMP. The possibilities are endless, and the sophistication and ease of image manipulation increases by the day for average users.

Check out this article for trends in how photo manipulation is changing photography.

Read more: http://www.brighthub.com/multimedia/photography/articles/38285.aspx#ixzz1D2Mj94vn

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Read more: http://www.brighthub.com/multimedia/photography/articles/38285.aspx#ixzz1D2MTGlf2

The Map Is Not the Road

A picture can act as a map toward greater consciousness — it can point toward things, signify things — but it is not the road itself. Until digital photography came along, most people were, and perhaps still are, as Thom Hartmann suggests, “unconsciously incompetent” about how pictures shape or construct meaning and reality. In other words, we haven’t been trained to think carefully about the power of images.

How can we trust what we see in the media in an age of digital manipulation? Can we really train ourselves to be more visually literate and consciously competent?

Even though most of us appreciate how media images can edify and inform us, or perhaps even save us from our personal biases, pictures are not a panacea for critical thinking. If anything, pictures aid the unconscious mind in constructing conditions of knowing the world in certain ways.

Theorist Thomas Sebeok’s claim, “The more we see the more we know and understand, and conversely, the less we see, the less we know and understand,” may be argued in an age when tampering with pictorial representations of places, people, and things appears to be more normalized as an unintended reality of technological change.

Sometimes today, the more we see, the less we know.

The Ethics of Digital Photo ManipulationDoctoring photographs has been around almost as long as photography itself, but as digital imaging hardware and software has both advanced and come down in price, the practice of digital image manipulation has become much more commonplace and faked photos are becoming harder to detect. In fact, digital photo manipulation -- commonly referred to as 'photoshopping' -- has recently become a popular pastime, and many consider this photographic fakery to be a new art form. But when it works its way into photojournalism and the media, the issue of ethics comes to the forefront. How far can we take digital image manipulation and still maintain photographic integrity?

This article was first published in the December 1995/January 1996 issue of Leading and Learning with Technology ©1996 all rights reserved.

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DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY

A Question of Ethics

Bonnie Meltzer

As teachers we need to help our students be aware of the issues of imaging. Photo manipulation is not just about using the technology--it is about understanding our society.

While walking down a street in a big city, a newspaper cover caught my eye. From 100 feet away I said to myself, Somebody's been using Photoshop. The picture on the front page was of a noted personality all dressed up in the latest grunge-----not her usual style. What caught my eye was not the celebrity but the obvious use of photo manipulation. The hair was drawn on with bilious yellow and of a texture that was not real. As I got closer I could see that the artist who made the cover of this weekly paper wanted you to know that he had tampered with the original photo. It was very obvious.

I snatched up a copy of the paper to use at my next lecture on imaging. I now had a perfect visual example of badly executed, very clumsy photo manipulation. But why did I want such a bad photo? Because this cover, especially juxtaposed with a skillfully manipulated photo, raises two of the most important questions about photo manipulation. Why are photographs edited, anyway? Does it make a difference if you can tell that a photo has been edited?

The Importance of Reading Images

Computer-edited photographs are ubiquitous. Even if we weren't teachers we have to know the issues surrounding imaging. We live in an increasingly visual world. As individuals and as a culture, we need to know how to read and interpret visual images.

As teachers we need to help our students be aware of the uses and abuses of imaging. Photo manipulation is not just about using the technology --- is about understanding our society. We have to prepare our students as users of the technology because they will become adults who will be working in the newsrooms, laboratories, and graphic studios.

They are also going to be on the receiving end of all this manipulated visual information. We have to help them navigate through it all so they can become thinking adults. All this raises more questions. How do we tell what's real and What's not? How do we keep from believing everything that is printed? How do we keep from believing nothing?

Manipulating Photographs

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I will probably raise more questions in this article than I will answer. I can, however, give you a good idea of why people edit photographs. All of you who read this publication already know that computers are wondrous machines. When it comes to photography it seems even more magical. I can redecorate my whole house, loose ten pounds or even ten years, and leap tall building at a single bound all while sitting at my Mac. As an artist I am entranced by the creative things I can do. I can make a visual landscape replete with icons and symbols. I can stretch reality to create new meaning by mixing images that don't normally appear together. I can make reality unreal and, conversely, make fantasy seem real.

Artists sometimes need to work with the mundane. We have to take the bad photographs that our clients give us and make them printable. I recently received a newsletter that had a picture of a group of board members on the front page. I don't think it was an editorial comment that the members of the board were gray and faceless. Whoever was responsible for putting the newsletter together didn't know that a photo can be made lighter and brighter, be given more contrast, and have the image sharped. With a computer and photo manipulation software, the contrast in the photo could have been adjusted turning this photo into a nice group portrait instead of a faceless blob.

Family pictures that are so faded that you are afraid that the image won't last until next year, much less the next generation, can also be made more visible with imaging. Even after all these years of working with enhancement software, I am amazed at how much can be made visible with the right techniques and, of course, software. Grandma's features reappear!

And speaking of family pictures, what about the one in which you look really cute but it appears that a parking meter is growing out of your head? Aunt Sally could never master the view finder! Again, photo imaging software comes to the rescue. Not only can you erase the parking meter but you can extend the rest of the background to fill in where the meter stood.

It used to be that you needed zillions of dollars worth of hardware and complicated software to accomplish these feats. Now, however, our fourth grade students can achieve these miracles with even LC's and low cost software like Color It!

The Ethics of Manipulation

Why do you think that Oprah Whinfrey's head on Ann Margaret's body appeared on the cover of August 26, 1989 issue of TV Guide? Try to imagine a final production meeting in which an editor might have tried to explain the decision to use that photo:

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I need a picture of Oprah, a new one now that she is thin but we don't have one and we go to press too soon to get one. What shall we do? Let's see, we have an old picture of her. Let's but her head on a thin body. We can do that now, right? Who will know? We just have to match the direction of the head and the body. We don't even have to worry about color. We can match any skin tone. We need to do this now .

Is a deadline a good enough justification for this solution? Is laziness a good enough reason? Is cost a good enough reason?

The Oprah example may seem rather trivial---Unless, of course, the picture was of you. The intent may be different, but is there any difference in the editor's solution and painting a mustache and beard on a poster? Both are violations of the person pictured. Does it matter that in one instance the attempt was made to make the person look good while the other was made to discredit the person? Answering the questions begets more questions

The matter of intent must be discussed. In the Oprah example, we have surmised that "truth" may sometimes be distorted because of laziness. But there are other reasons images are manipulated. The two headed goats on the cover of the supermarket tabloids are made to deceive. Can a can of pop be removed electronically from a table without being deceptive? Should a person ever be added or subtracted from a photo? Again we must consider intent. Is the photo of people going to be used at a trial? Is it for a newsletter or class picture? Does it appear in a reliable newspaper as a news item? What makes the difference between a positive use of photo manipulation and an abuse of it?

Even positive intent can lead to distortion. A person editing photographs must always be aware of the way our soviet reads symbols. You have seen the June 27,1994 covers of Newsweek and Time with two different versions of the same mug shot of O. J. Simpson. The Time cover make Simpson's face darker, blurrier, and unshaven. Matt Mahurin, the illustrator at Time Magazine who manipulated the police photo of O. J., at his word, he said that he "wanted to make it more artful, more compelling." He forgot to ask the following questions:

Should a police photo be manipulated? A news photo be manipulated? Are certain kinds of images symbols for complicated attitudes and issues.

Are certain symbols or images understood differently by different ethnic groups or segments of society.

Will my intent be misinterpreted? Will I be unsuccessful as a visual communicator?

We are left asking ourselves the question: Was Mr. Mahurin a racist, an unthinking person or a bad artist?

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Newsweek published the same mug shot without altering it. It was the juxtaposition of both the Time and Newsweek covers that really points to the issues. No other example of photo manipulation gives us as much to talk about as these two covers. The issues are present with other examples from the media but they aren't as clearly defined.

Student Awareness

The question you are probably asking at this point is, What can I do? One way of helping students to understand the issues surrounding photo manipulation is to have them ask questions. Make them aware of all the issues involves when they create images for the school newspapers, art class, term papers and other school work. You can start with Where? When? Why? How? and What?

Where did I get this photo? Is it mine to use? When can I use a copyrighted photo?

Why am I changing this photo?

How will the readers interpret this photo?

How would they have interpreted it without editing?

What is the context of the photo? Is this photo supposed to be truth (journalism) or fantasy (art)?

For those of you who don't teach imaging the same questions can be asked of newspaper and magazine photos, TV advertisements, and even mail. The idea is to enable your students to observe, analyze, evaluate, and yes, think critically about the tons of visual material that come their way.

The manipulation of photographs is not new. In 1903 Edward Steichen said . . .

In the very beginning, when the operator controls and regulates his time of exposure, when in the dark room the developer is mixed for detail, breath, flatness or contrast, faking has been resorted to. In fact every photograph is a fake from start to finish, a purely impersonal, unmanipulated photograph being practically impossible. When all is said, it still remains entirely a matter of degree and ability. Adobe Magazine 6(3), 104)

It is also true that photographers touch up photographs, but it was a long and arduous process. Digital editing is faster and easier. The tools are within economic reach for institutions and individuals. Thus more photographs can be and are manipulated.

My intent in writing this article is to make you aware of the issues--to get you to ask questions--to stimulate discussion and to encourage debate with your students and your

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peers. Some questions can't be answered easily. Others can't be answered at all. But to not ask the questions is to miss a great opportunity.

Reprinted with permission from Learning And Leading With Technology, vol. 23 no. 4, published by the International Society for Technology in Education and Bonnie Meltzer ©1996. All rights reserved.

Bonnie Meltzer is an artist and an educator. She uses a computer to design her work. Not only does she make digital collages but she uses recycled computer parts for jewelry and sculpture. As an educator she is available for computer workshops and lectures on digital photography and making visual arts on the computer. Her specialty is teaching artists and teachers.She has taught every age group and ability level from pre-school kids to 94 yer old senior citizens and from computer novice to computer wizzard.

1. The advent of computers and digital photography has not created the need for a whole new set of ethical standards. We are not dealing with something brand new. We merely have a new way of processing images and the same principles that have guided us in traditional photojournalism should be the principles that guide us in the use of the computers. This fact makes dealing with computer related ethics far less daunting than if we had to begin from square one.

John Long

Every Picture Can Tell a LieDavid Shenk 10.20.97 Just a few weeks before the Paris car crash that killed Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed, the Mirror, a London tabloid, published a picture of the glamorous new couple romancing on a boat, leaning toward one another, apparently about to kiss. It was all so provocative.

In fact, though, that kiss never happened. The picture had been digitally altered; Dodi's head was rotated slightly to make it look as though a smooch was in the works.

The technical wizardry of this manipulation will impress few Synapse readers. Anyone who has spent five minutes fooling with imaging software knows how simple such tampering can be. Programs such as Photoshop may be the single best emblem of the immense new - and eminently abusable - power conferred on humanity by the digital revolution: With a little will and some

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patience, virtually anyone can do virtually anything to a photograph. Had the editors so desired, they could have shown Diana painting starbursts on Dodi's chest, with Boris Yeltsin standing right behind them, pinching Diana's butt.

But that's not the type of thing most editors do with Photoshop. What they do is far more subtle and insidious. Take the case of Rebecca Sealfon, winner of this year's United States National Spelling Bee. Naturally, she was elated the moment she won. The Associated Press distributed a photograph of an exuberant teenager screaming for joy and waving her arms in the air. Hanging down in front of her ruffled white blouse was her large entrant placard. It read:

140Daily News

New York, New York

This meant simply that Sealfon was entrant number 140, and that the New York Daily News was her sponsor for the event.

A curious thing happened, though, when the picture appeared the next day in the New York Post, a Daily News competitor. The "140" was a lot bigger on the placard, and the phrase "Daily News" had vanished.

This excision is so petty and insubstantial, one might convincingly argue that it belongs in the Who Cares file. But I think it's a significant symbol of what photographs are becoming in the wired world, and of the havoc that high-tech editors are already beginning to wreak on the institution of photojournalism.

Clearly, "photofiction," as some call it, is potentially provocative even as an art form (though there is plenty of room for skepticism here too - turning an ordinary photograph into a hallucinatory gallery of disassociated images does not automatically make it art). As a new journalistic tool, though, it is highly suspect. People look to photographs as quasi-objective representations of firsthand data, as a form of verification or proof. As soon as the essential integrity of a photo is undermined, so is the relationship between the news provider and the news consumer.

Obviously, there is no justification for an editor digitally repositioning subjects in order to give the false impression that a kiss or slap or snub is taking place. But I would argue that the manipulation needn't be nearly so flagrant in order to be unethical and damaging. When untidy or unappealing objects are cleaned up or removed, the essence of that photo also quickly disappears. The unspoken contract between the photographer and the viewer is broken. The photo is no longer a glimpse of the scene. It is now an illustration: an interpretation with selective facts, categorized in a particular way, with some details highlighted, many others simply obliterated.

There is no such thing as true objectivity, of course, in photography or any other medium. By its nature, a photograph is an incomplete and therefore slanted picture of reality - a stylized

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depiction that represents exactly what the photographer wants you to see, and no more. Each photograph is like a story, and we have to remember that behind every story is a storyteller.

It's also worth recalling that conventional photo-manipulation has been around as long as the camera. Cropping alone is a powerful tool, and there are plenty of basic darkroom techniques for removing or altering aspects of any photograph. Surrealist art photographers like Jerry Uelsmann have captivated colleagues and collectors for decades by creatively embedding exotic foreign images into natural landscapes.

Thankfully, though, Uelsmann doesn't try to pass his work off as reality. Nor is he under pressure to spike up sales on the newsstands. But in photo editors' hands, this new digital sandbox threatens to cheapen journalism and even further undermine news consumers' confidence in the media. By making dramatic manipulations simple to effect and difficult to detect, photofiction threatens to exacerbate the climate of distrust.

Fortunately, there's an easy antidote, in the form of a full-disclosure proposal by former New York Times Magazine photo editor Fred Ritchin. Ritchin has developed a new icon, a tiny crossed-out camera lens, which he would like to see affixed to any published photograph with digital alterations.

Whether or not Ritchin's proposal catches on, there is likely to be one beneficial byproduct of the digital poisoning of photojournalism. Sooner or later, the mass consumer audience will catch on to the manipulation, probably through a major celebrity scandal. When they do, consumers will permanently say goodbye to their image-naiveté. A new variety of skepticism will flourish. Critical awareness of photojournalism's subjectivity will spread far and wide.

But let's not allow that to justify the stupidity. If we let the system break down completely, skepticism will yield to destructive cynicism. And if that happens, we will all be sorry. Today, a good picture is worth a thousand words. For the life of me, I can't figure out why we would want to devalue that, and make a picture worth nothing more than a lie.

M A Y  1 9 9 8

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The wildlife photography we see in films, books, and periodicals is often stunning in its design, import, and aesthetics. It may also be fake, enhanced, or manufactured by emerging

digital technologies that have transformed -- some say contaminated -- the photography landscape

by Kenneth Brower

The online version of this article appears in three parts. Click here to go to part two. Click here to go to part three.

PRESTIDIGITATION

HIRTY years ago, in the age before the cruise ships came, I spent four months in the Galápagos Islands with the photographer Eliot Porter. The Galápagos were wilder, less-visited islands then. They had yet to become the most photographed archipelago on earth.

Porter was making the pictures, and I was gathering notes, for the first volume in what would become a vast library, that ponderous collection of large-format Galápagos books now decorating coffee tables everywhere. Porter, our first great master of nature photography in color, was then sixty-four, the grand old man of his art. I was twenty-one, just beginning a career that was to be spent in large part outdoors in the company of nature photographers. Among my duties in the Galápagos were helping to lug Porter's 4X5 camera and tripod up volcanoes, rowing dories in through surf, and hunting meat, like Robinson Crusoe, on various islands with our guide's old bolt-action .22. It was one of the best times of my life. Discuss this article in the Arts & Literature forum of Post & Riposte.

Go to part two of this article.

Go to part three of this article.

Related link:

Digital Image ProcessingA "Young Scholars in Computing" project that explores ethical and technological issues surrounding photo manipulation and photojournalism.

Accompanying our expedition was Tad Nichols, a former Disney cameraman, and in the islands we crossed paths with the British nature photographer Alan Root, then just beginning his own remarkable career. In the Galápagos I had my first opportunity to study the habits of cameramen in the wild.

Anchored off Santiago Island one evening, over a dinner of feral goat, the photographers grew expansive and the talk turned to nature fakery. Porter was a purist. He believed in shooting straight. He admitted to having occasionally moved a stone or feather or piece of driftwood to improve one of his compositions, but he was generally opposed to this sort of manipulation, and he grew uneasy talking about it. Root and Nichols came from a more pragmatic, rough-and-tumble school of commercial nature photography. Root told us the story of a Life cover a

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colleague had done. The image had begun in the mind of one of the magazine's editors. By a kind of redactional clairvoyance this editor, seated comfortably at his desk in Manhattan, had seen it all clearly: leopard and its kill in thorn tree, branches framing a setting sun. The photographer set off in quest of this vision, traveling the East African savanna for weeks with a captive leopard, killing antelopes, draping the carcasses in the branches of various thorn trees, and cajoling the leopard to lie proudly on the "kill," a tableau that the photographer shot against a succession of setting suns. Tad Nichols laughed ruefully yet appreciatively. He told the story of his own work on Disney's The Living Desert, most of which was filmed on ersatz dunes built on a vast sound-stage table. Root countered with a story of some clever photoduplicity, the details of which I have since forgotten. Nichols came back with a tale of how Disney's minions bulldozed lemmings off cliffs for the famous lemming-suicide sequence.

And so it went, confession piling on confession. Both Root and Nichols affected a sad cynicism about the unseemly things they were called upon to do, but underneath, clearly, was a grifter's glee at various con jobs well executed -- and under that, if I am not mistaken, was a soupçon of genuine shame. At twenty-one, I was scarcely weaned from the Disney nature documentaries. I particularly remember one revelation of how Uncle Walt's men had fabricated the hawk-kills-flying-squirrel episode. (Assistant grip stands on tall stepladder with pouch of flying squirrels. Grip tosses squirrels -- unpaid rodent extras -- skyward one by one, as in skeet shoot, until trained hawk, after dozens of misses, finally gets it right.)

Photofakery, then, is nothing new. The first attempts at it no doubt followed shortly upon Daguerre's initial success with his camera obscura. But photography of late has entered a brave new epoch. No photographer today would bother cruising the bush with trained leopards to fake a sunset shot. Anyone with Adobe Photoshop ($589 when I last checked; $599 with a scanner thrown in) could find a perfectly adequate leopard in the zoo, digitally edit out the bars of the cage, tree the cat with subtle movements of mouse, bloodlessly procure a dead antelope (if his computer held any in files), and then set the whole collage against a virtual setting sun. Indeed, he could tree his leopard against the rings of Saturn if he was so inclined. A leopard can't change his spots, but the modern photographer can easily do it for him. With some of the applications now available to filmmakers, the photographer could arrange for the leopard to lose a fight with John Wayne, or to dance with Fred Astaire, who has been shown dancing with a vacuum cleaner

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in a recent television commercial.

"In a strict sense photography can never be abstract, for the camera is incapable of synthetic integration," Ansel Adams wrote in 1932. Synthetic integration, unimaginable sixty-five years ago by one of the art's great technicians, is now full upon us. The old magic is fast becoming a kind of prestidigitation.

More and more digitally doctored images are appearing in the media. The trend alarms a number of photographers. It worries certain editors, and it worries me. I am troubled not only as a colleague -- a nonfiction writer whose text often runs alongside photographs of wild lands and wildlife -- but also as a casual student of the history of nature photography, an admirer of the art, and a friend of many who practice it. I have shared tents and blinds and small boats and even the mouthpieces of scuba regulators with these people. I love them for their hardiness, their courage, and their constant griping about the weather, sticky shutters, leaky housings, bad strobes, native customs, the myopia of photo editors, and the intransigence of wild animals. I am always impressed by their skill at improvisation in the field. I admire -- to a certain extent -- their ingenuity. But it is clear to me that the photographer's work philosophy is not always congruent with the expectations of those of us who view the work. Too few photographers, I think, appreciate how directly the new technology aims at the heart of the credibility that distinguishes this art form from others.

The controversy over digital manipulation has been simmering for some time. It first surfaced in 1982, when National Geographic ran a computer-altered photo of the Pyramids at Giza on its cover. To the traditional adjustments of reality that the photographer had already made -- shooting with a telephoto lens to exaggerate the scale of the Pyramids and persuading three camel riders to pass a second time before those great tombs -- the magazine's editors added a new one: digitally moving the camels backward a few paces.

In 1991 the board of directors of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), noting that emerging electronic technology enabled "the manipulation of the content of an image in such a way that the change is virtually undetectable," adopted a statement of principle: "As journalists we believe the guiding principle of our profession is accuracy; therefore, we believe it is wrong to alter the content of a photograph in any way that deceives the public."

The North American Nature Photography Association has yet to agree on any principle so strong. Many NANPA members feel that they have a poetic license broader than the one issued to their cousins, the photojournalists of the NPPA. Still, at the first Annual Nature Photography Forum, held by NANPA in 1994, the ethics session was dominated by fierce debate on the issues of nature photography in commercial game farms and of digital manipulation. Tom Mangelsen, a wildlife photographer from Jackson, Wyoming, lamented the new trends and tallied the damage they had caused the profession: the loss of incentive to compete in the wild, the loss of the sense of adventure, the loss of pride in one's work, and the loss of the public's respect for wildlife photography.

Art Wolfe, a nature photographer based in Seattle, was the first in the crowd to respond. "We're living in an age of back-swinging toward conservative ethics," Wolfe said. "Whenever I hear the

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word 'ethics,' it raises the hair on the back of my neck. The point here is that we all have different standards. I certainly don't want to be told by somebody else what I should be doing."

The debate intensified in 1996, when exposés in The Denver Post and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer revealed how Wolfe's 1994 book Migrations had been fabricated. In about a third of the book's images the wildlife -- caribou, zebra, geese, greater sandhill cranes -- had been digitally enhanced, and some had been digitally cloned and multiplied.

"Nature photographs are generally accepted as and trusted to be straightforward records of what the photographer witnessed and recorded on film in a single instant," the photographer Gary Braasch wrote in a letter to the NANPA ethics committee in June of 1996, as the debate over Migrations fulminated in the camera magazines. "This is an acceptance hallowed by years of communication among photographers, editors, publishers, and viewers."

The fact is that this acceptance has often been "hallowed" in the breach. As the advocates of digital doctoring like to point out, the old boys faked it too.

Recently I checked my recollections of Eliot Porter with John Rohrbach, the associate curator of photographs at the Amon Carter Museum, in Fort Worth, and the custodian of the Eliot Porter collection there. Rohrbach confirmed my impression that Porter did not believe in setups but was sometimes tempted. He corroborated my sense that Porter was uneasy discussing the matter. "We actually have a picture of him hacking away at a cactus to get a picture of a roadrunner nest," Rohrbach said. "Paul Strand was even more adamant that no retouching at all should occur. But there are prints where Strand drew in manholes or etched out people to balance his compositions." Related link:

Ansel AdamsA brief biography with links to sites showing Adams' work.

In his first years of printing his most famous photograph, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941, Ansel Adams, in his words, "allowed some random clouds in the upper sky area to show." They always annoyed him, and in the 1970s he arranged in the darkroom for those clouds to evaporate. In his celebrated Winter Sunrise, The Sierra Nevada From Lone Pine, California, Adams deleted from the dark foothills of the middle ground the big "LP" that the little town's high school students had laid out in whitewashed stones.

This image of the Sierra at sunrise -- distant horse grazing beneath a horizon of bare aspens in sunlight; dark, unblemished foothills in shadow; and finally the bright, jagged cordillera of the Sierra in sunlight -- opens This Is the American Earth, the first volume of the "exhibit-format

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series" that my father, David Brower, began in 1960 at the Sierra Club. Under my father's editorship the series eventually grew to thirty volumes, thirteen of which I wrote or edited. As a fourteen-year-old, well before my father thought to press me into service, I watched This Is the American Earth come together at Adams's house in San Francisco. The creative excitement among the three principal contributors -- Adams, my father, and Nancy Newhall, the author of the text -- was a wonderful thing to behold until the martinis kicked in, always derailing Newhall first. I remember the print of Lone Pine on Adams's table. I have a vague recollection that the photographer was less than proud of having excised the "LP." My father recalls otherwise -- that Adams simply thought the town's initials messed up his picture and he wanted them out of there.

In 1964, taking a kind of sabbatical after my freshman year at Berkeley, I assembled my first exhibit-format book, a photo essay on California's Big Sur coast. Early in the editing I worked for two weeks out of Adams's new house in Carmel Highlands. By day I collected the work of the several photographic geniuses resident along that shore. By night, back at Adams's house, I watched the maestro "dodge and burn" in his darkroom. To dodge -- to withhold light from an area of the print for a timed period in the developing process -- was once considered, as the term suggests, somewhat underhanded, but it had long since become accepted practice. The same was true of burning, or concentrating light on an area of the print. Adams's darkroom, then just two years old, was state-of-the-art. He had designed it to produce mural-size prints. The enlarging camera was huge, like a Brownie from Brobdingnag. The bellows on the thing would have worked for Vulcan at his forge. Mounted on rails, the camera faced a rail-mounted easel holding the print paper. Adams wore a blue apron that protected everything but the turquoise-and-silver clasp of his string tie. Working over the nascent print, Adams would aim his great deviant beak at it appraisingly. (He had broken his nose when he was four years old, in the San Francisco quake of 1906, which had thrown him against a garden wall. In crushing his septum, the great earthquake was also responsible, I have always assumed, for the strange adenoidal quality of his voice.) His fingers, gnarled by arthritis, would hold the dodging wand. Making little incantatory circles with the wand over the area he wanted lightened, he would laugh his crazy, nasal, Mephistophelian laugh.

It was all white magic, I can't help thinking. The small adjustments to reality that occurred in Ansel Adams's darkroom, if crimes at all, were misdemeanors. That photographs should be "straightforward records of what the photographer witnessed and recorded on film in a single instant" still seems a worthy ideal, despite the fact that some of our greatest have stretched and jiggered it. Many fine principles are hallowed in the breach. This does not mean that they exert no influence, or that we should dispense with them entirely.

SHEPHERD

OST of my commerce with photographers has been in the field, not in the darkroom. Digitalization overtook photography some time ago, but I have been a Rip Van Winkle in this matter -- if not exactly asleep for twenty years, then inattentive for about that period.

To bring myself up to speed, I called at the photography studio of Joseph Holmes, in Kensington, California. Holmes is an old friend whose heroes are my heroes. "Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, Edward Weston," he says. "A little Brett Weston. Monet. Van Gogh. O'Keeffe. Thomas Moran." Holmes is a consummate and obsessive printmaker, in the tradition of Adams, and he has a

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Porterlike eye for composition. He has published several books of photographs, among them the exquisite Natural Light (a promising title, in view of my prejudices), yet he has thrown himself completely into digitalization.

Holmes's downstairs workroom did not look like any darkroom I remembered. It held no red light, no developing trays. A scanner and ink-jet printers of various sorts lay atop a large table in the middle of the room. Stacks of books, manuals, and papers overspilled the table and completely covered the floor, except where Holmes had cleared a narrow corridor to his computer. "My curse is perfectionism," he had once admitted to me. As we picked our way through the room, I realized that this curse was confined to his printmaking. It has not yet afflicted his housekeeping. He lifted a book to clear a chair for me.

"I wind up reading stuff like this," he said, flipping through the pages. "Engineering manuals for hard drives. It's ridiculous." Opening to a diagram, he thrust it at me. "Here's how you should cool the hard drive. I like to read about stuff like this when my hard drives die from overheating. It's horrible when your hard drive dies on you."

Closing the curtain on the window above his computer monitor, Holmes sat at the keyboard. I offered to close the side door as well, which stood half open to the sunlit yard outside. For a moment Holmes seemed baffled by this suggestion. No need, he said, after an awkward pause. The color out there -- the warm light on the concrete -- was hardly the sort that would interfere with the fidelity of the colors on the screen.

With a stylus on a Wacom ArtZ tablet in his lap, Holmes summoned an image: Lily pads, Reelfoot Lake, Tennessee, 1979.

Clockwise from top left: Joseph Holmes's photograph Lily Pads, Reelfoot Lake, Tennessee, 1979, with two hundred and eighty-five megabytes in the image. With each successive frame the magnification increases by a factor of four.

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If these lilies had begun as homage to Monet, Holmes had managed to put his own stamp on them. In Monet's Giverny lilies, on canvas after canvas, the life is in the colors of sky and vegetation reflected on the water. In Holmes's Tennessee lilies the reflected sky is colorless -- a luminous gray -- and all the life is in the verdant topography of the pads and in the gems of dew on them. If the eye stops anywhere in the Holmes picture, it is on a great, glittering Hope Diamond of dew cupped in the green tureen of the largest pad.

"In this special format there are two hundred and eighty-five megabytes in the image of lilies," Holmes said. "There were two ten in the original format. A two-ten-meg file -- that's seventy million image pixels. A very large number of little squares." Here, too, Holmes diverged from the master. Claude Monet was no pointillist. He liked to load up his brush. In the most detailed of Monet's lily ponds the number of brushstrokes falls well short of 70 million.

Holmes proceeded to deconstruct his lilies. With light touches of stylus on pad he instructed the computer to open an image with lots of edit layers and then to peel away layers. As he removed each layer, a kind of shiver traveled through the image. It was ominous, somehow, as if a gust of ill wind had blown across Reelfoot Lake. The lilies would darken or lighten imperceptibly. The edges of the pads would shift and refocus in subtle, indescribable ways. These tiny metamorphoses caused me to consider the great mystery of how the world -- its shapes and colors -- looks to others. The computer, it seemed, was trying to solve the mystery -- to educate the solipsist in me. This was like gazing at Reelfoot Lake through a succession of different corneas.

"I'm turning off the upper layers so we can move quickly into the picture, just to give you an idea how many pixels there are in this image," Holmes said. "This is one magnification factor of two."

The computer enlarged a section of the image that Holmes had selected. Like a detail from a painting, the fragment -- a single lily pad, and the pad's dark shadow on the water, and the bright water beneath the shadow's curving edge -- became more interesting than the totality of the canvas.

"Here's a second factor of two."

We were plummeting headlong into the lily pad, it seemed, but Holmes apologized for the slowness of our journey. He explained that the computer was reading the compressed image, decompressing it on the fly, and displaying it on the screen.

"A third factor of two," he said.

We were plunging now into the darkness of the lily's shadow, and I found myself, contrary to all expectation, very excited. I had come prepared to dislike everything about digitalization, but I loved this sensation of being pulled into the microcosm. The fascination at the core of Antonioni's movie Blow-Up was all here in Reelfoot Lake.

"A fourth factor of two."

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Each time we lurched deeper into the picture, the image on the screen, though it could only be accidental now, continued to look composed. The arrangement looked intentional. What is the magic in the frame? In any frame? The simple act of framing with the hands, or a viewfinder, or a computer screen, causes a scene to jump out at us. Throw a frame around almost anything, and the elements within try to harmonize. Composition resides more in nature, maybe, and in the effort of the viewer, than it does in the sensibilities of photographers and artists.

"A fifth factor of two."

"Oh, my goodness," I heard myself say. It sounded awfully prim, like something Dorothy would cry on her departure from Kansas. I was pixilated and pixelated. Another few factors of two, I calculated, and we would be probing the atomic structure of Reelfoot Lake. The darkness of the lily-shadowed water would soon flicker with the dance of electrons and quarks.

"I could change one pixel in the image," Holmes said. "I have infinite control. This is a small part of the picture, and you still don't see any little squares. The trick in digital imaging is always to have more than enough pixels to not see them." He added that if necessary he could build something called a ramp within an individual pixel. "You can dodge and burn the tiniest thing. When you have access to complete digital control, then you can get total tonal control."

He gave me a sidelong glance and then delivered an apostasy. "I don't know if you've ever gone back and looked at Ansel's stuff. At the Ansel Adams Center, in San Francisco, they have a collection of his prints on permanent display, all dated from the early seventies. I looked at them recently, and I was shocked. They're miserable compared with recent reproductions, because the reproductions were done on a drum scanner that gave tonal control sufficient to add separation to the highlights and to the shadows. Photography has a terrible problem with highlights and shadows. It's one of the big reasons why photographs look like photographs. Highlights are washed out, usually, and shadows are black -- 'the soot and the chalk' that Ansel used to rail against. That's not the way the world really looks."

Holmes's favorite piece of two-dimensional art is not a photograph but an oil on canvas, a Van Gogh painting of olive orchards. The richness of the Van Gogh, which Holmes first saw on loan at the National Gallery, stunned and overwhelmed him. Renoir's The Luncheon of the Boating Party drives him insane, he says. Renoir's ability to explore details in his shadows far exceeds anything a photographer could do.

"Most people are oblivious of the way their eyes work," Holmes said. "They just see. They take it in, they extract the particular fact they need to deal with, and they entirely miss the mechanisms of seeing. It never occurs to them that they have a vast dynamic range in their eyes, and that they can adjust through vast light-level changes, from sunlight on snow at high altitude to starlight at night -- an incredible ten-million-to-one range. Photography is this miserable, weak little thing that can show you a print with a hundred-to-one brightness range. Or a two-hundred-to-one brightness range, tops."

Joseph Holmes's quest for the perfect print -- a crusade he does not seem to find at all quixotic --

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has occupied the past twenty-three years. Ansel Adams, who shared this almost religious dedication to the print, turned to music for his metaphor and mantra. "The negative is the score," Adams would recite. "The print is the performance." Holmes spends most of his time directing the performance. His servitude to the print requires him to spend his life in the studio; his time in the field toting a camera has been reduced to three or four weeks a year. He does not like this imbalance but sees no way around it.

"Every time I try to print by a new method, it's another five-year project to get it going," he said. "It took five years to get going on dye transfer, it took five years to get going on Cibachrome, and it's taken five years again to get going on digital imaging. But it's unavoidable. I have no choice."

The rewards of his latest five-year project -- which is now actually in its eighth year -- would soon be enormous, he predicted. His average labor time on a Cibachrome print had been four hours. With digital imaging the time is reduced radically. "I could make only a few hundred Cibachrome prints a year, maximum," he said. "Ansel made, what, twenty-five thousand prints in his lifetime, of about eighteen hundred different subjects. So far I've printed a hundred subjects. I need to print several hundred subjects to have what I think is a reasonable life's work."

I could understand the allure of any process that reduced the hours of printmaking and freed the photographer to roam. I remembered Ansel Adams's old lament about the prison of his darkroom. Beside his house in Carmel Highlands, overlooking the Pacific, beneath a hill covered in chaparral and floodlit beautifully at night, was the fireproof bunker in which Adams stored his negatives. He would complain often that several lifetimes' worth of work lay there underground. It really made no sense, he said, to take a single new photograph. He laughed at the irony, but I believe that it truly depressed him. I think it diminished his thrill in spreading the legs of the tripod and disappearing under the black cloth. The backlog of negatives meant that most of the images he had seen through the viewfinder, and visualized as prints, and captured with his camera, would never grow past the embryonic stage represented by the negative. Much of his lifework would never be seen by others.

Joseph Holmes, after eight years of work with digital imaging, has become an expert in the new science of color management. Much of his income now comes from consulting for fine-art printmaking companies, lithographers, publishers, museums -- anyone with imaging problems. "It's sort of like herding an infinite number of sheep over rough terrain," he says. "All the sheep are individual colors, they're all trying to get away, and you're trying to keep them in order. It's the science of device-independent color, where the color characteristics of every device in your system -- the scanner and the way the scanner sees film, the monitor, the printer and the way the printer prints on a given substrate -- are all described in device-independent terms. Their colors are described in absolute color numbers that become a common language of color. When it all works right, the colors you see on your monitor are the colors in the print, but there are a vast number of ways for it not to turn out right."

Digital-imaging technology is evolving by leaps and bounds, Holmes said. A number of companies are racing to develop the best printers, and each year's ink-jet machines are twice as good as those of the year before. "It's endless," he said. Hearing the weariness in his voice, I

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asked if he worried that his labors might be Sisyphean, given the way the technology keeps changing. He denied it. He was familiar now with computer systems. Once digital printmaking really started to work, he said, it would only get better and easier.

I hoped he was right. I hoped that the grail would not keep receding -- that digital imaging would free him to take his good eye out under the sky more often. It will be terrible if he winds up an old shepherd, hunched at the screen, driving his obstreperous, bleating, multicolored flock through ever more mountainous Himalayas, stretched out range on range through cyberspace.

When I asked Holmes his opinion on the controversy over digital manipulation, he shrugged. The issue did not interest him much. "It's obvious that Art Wolfe should have mentioned in his book that he was adding extra animals," he said. "That's a substantial distortion of reality. One of the things that nature photographs do, inevitably, is to report on nature. But they don't necessarily do it in literal ways. It's not easy to define how much of a given landscape photograph consists of reportage and how much is an artistic interpretation."

"If Wolfe had acknowledged a little more clearly what he had done, it would have been okay?" I asked.

"Well, certainly. Why not? People paint things all the time. We don't think they're criminals for making paintings."

The online version of this article appears in three parts. Click here to go to part two. Click here to go to part three.

Kenneth Brower is a frequent contributor to The Atlantic, specializing in ecological issues.

Illustrations by Istvan Banyai

Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.The Atlantic Monthly; May 1998; Photography in the Age of Falsification; Volume 281, No. 5; pages 92 - 111.

Photographic Truth in the Digital Era

Advances in digital technology mean that anyone with a computer and image-manipulation software can easily cut and paste a wide range of images into an apparently seamless whole. The old advertising slogan "Is it live or is it Memorex?" takes on a whole new meaning when trying to separate truth from fabrication in photos that appear to be real. Pranksters, hucksters and even journalists are proving that more often than not, we can't believe everything we see.

Examples exist in all visual media. In October 2001 the National Post featured an article about the Queen being given a cell phone for her birthday, accompanied by a photo of a smiling Queen Elizabeth waving her Telus cell phone. When alert readers pointed out that this model of phone was only available in Canada, the Post had to 'fess up that the cell

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phone had been digitally added to the photo. Film makers routinely integrate digital manipulation to enhance special effects in movies -- a few examples include, Tom Hanks' image digitally integrated into actual historical footage in the film Forrest Gump; Jurrasic Park's Dinosaurs; the creatures, space crafts and worlds in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace; and, of course, the technical (if not critical) triumph of computer generation, Final Fantasy. On television, advertisers display virtual ads on the playing fields of sporting events. These ads appear to be part of the scenery, but they can only be seen by the television viewing audience. A more obvious example of digital manipulation is when cartoon spokescharacters "interact" with the live children who appear in cereal and snack food commercials. In magazines, photos of models and celebrities are routinely doctored to make the subjects more appealing. And, of course, digital manipulation is thriving on the Internet, where there are few gatekeepers and countless opportunities for misinformation.

Digital manipulation can add credibility to urban legends and hoaxes. In the days following the horrific attack of the World Trade Center, a photo of a tourist being photographed just seconds before the tragedy was widely circulated. Supposedly, the camera containing the shot was found in the rubble of the twin towers.

It didn't take long to discover that this image was from the "Tourist Guy" Web site -- a digitally manipulated "Where's Waldo" photo gallery of the hapless tourist plunked into a wide variety of historical and humorous scenarios.

Photo manipulation has long been used for propaganda, and digital manipulation only makes this easier. As early as the 1930s dictators such as Stalin would use photo manipulation to make their enemies "unpeople," retroactively erasing them from history. Doctored photos have been used to justify the invasion of Iraq, most recently, to disguise a mis-firing Iranian missile, copying the image of one that fired successfully and pasting it over the dud. 

Digital manipulation also feeds political humour. Since September 11th, the Internet has been flooded with digitally enhanced parodies -- most often at Osama Bin Laden's expense. Images like "Dr. Evil and Mini Bin" and George Bush as "The Turbanator" are just a few of the hundreds of digitally enhanced images that have been making the rounds via e-mail.

   

 

 

 

 

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Source: About.com

Digital manipulation can have serious social ramifications. Presently law makers in Canada and the United States are grappling with the legal issues surrounding the possession and creation of "virtual child pornography" -- computer-generated pornographic images that do not use actual children.

During the trial of O.J. Simpson, Time magazine received widespread criticism for manipulating a cover photograph of O.J. Simpson's police mug shot -- intentionally altered to make Simpson look darker and more menacing. Not only were there concerns regarding Simpson's right to a fair trial, but these images also fed public debate about racial stereotyping.

Source: National Press Photographers Association

More recently, Fox News altered images of a pair of New York Times reporters that had been critical of the network. (Original photos are to the left, doctored images to the right.)

Digital manipulation is the foundation of the fashion and beauty industry, where air-brushed and digitally enhanced portrayals of ideal male and female beauty promote standards of attractiveness that are impossible to achieve.

Source: Adbusters Quarterly, Summer 1995, vol.3, No. 4

In 1995, Adbusters paired a 1990 Esquire Cover that featured Michelle Pfeiffer and the caption "What Michelle Pfeiffer Needs... Is Absolutely Nothing" with a copy of the itemized bill for $1,525 in photo touchups that Diane Scott Associates, Inc. charged Esquire for their work in creating Michelle's flawless image.

The September 1994 issue of Mirabella featured a beautiful cover model with a caption that read "Who is the Face of America?"

It turned out that the "face of America" appearing on the cover was not one model, but a composite picture that was created by combining six pictures of

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six different women.

Online marketers are eager to tap into the digital possibilities for creating virtual environments in which visitors interact with human-like interfaces.

On April 19, 2000, Ananova, the world's first virtual newscaster, made her debut at ananova.com. Designed to provide a "face" to Web-based news, Ananova's final "look" was composed of "the most striking features and faces from fashion magazines."

Questions About Digital Manipulation

Brainstorm examples of both subtle and extreme forms of digital manipulation. When is digital manipulation acceptable?

When is digital manipulation not acceptable?

Under what conditions should viewers or readers be notified that an image has been digitally altered?

Is it easy to tell when an image has been digitally enhanced? What are some clues?

Have you ever noticed virtual advertising when watching televised sports? (An easy giveaway is when you are watching a game from the other side of the country, and the ads that appear on the billboards are for your local television station.) Are ads like these acceptable forms of advertising?

What are the copyright ramifications of combining existing images into a new image? Is permission needed from the creators of the original images?

How does context affect our response to digitally-altered images? For example, would an unacknowledged, digitally manipulated photograph in the Globe and Mail be more controversial than an altered image used by the National Enquirer?

When using digital manipulation to blend photos and images for the purposes of humour or parody, what has to be taken into consideration for the final image to be effective? (For example, for viewers to "get" the humour associated with "The Turbanator," the viewing audience must demonstrate a fair level of cultural understanding and be able to make the connections between the "tough action hero" movie persona of Arnold Schwartzenegger, George Bush and his response to terrorism in Afghanistan, and the underlying cultural messages about America and Americans.)

What are the social concerns relating to digital enhancement of photos and images?

Why are companies eager to "humanize" the Internet, through human-like interfaces such as Ananova?

What might be the consequences of our increasing interaction with virtual reality and human-like interfaces on computers and the Internet?

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Read the essay Digital Truth on the PBS site and respond to the questions "Is photographic truth at an end?" and "Has it ever existed?"

Activity

Ask students how easily they can tell when a photograph is real, or computer generated. Then have them complete the "Fake or Foto Quiz" that has been created on the Web site of the 3D graphic company Alias|Wavefront. In this quiz, visitors must decide which of the ten images shown are real, and which are digitally enhanced -- and it's not an easy task!

Recommended Links

The PBS series "American Photography: A Century of Images" looks at the ethical ramifications of digital manipulation -- "which is as old as photography itself." At the PBS Web site, the essay on Digital Truth outlines the problems associated with the "slippery slope" we risk sliding down when digital enhancement becomes the accepted norm. (Their adaptation of the famous "assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald" photo into "Oswald/Ruby as a Rock Band" is a fascinating example of digital manipulation. Show students the altered photo first, and ask them if they can identify the people shown in this different context.)

The American National Press Photographers Association Web site offers an excellent online report, "Ethics in the Age of Digital Photography," that includes many famous examples of digital manipulation.

"Designing Ananova" at Ananova.com provides a fascinating glimpse of the thinking behind the world's first virtual newscaster.

About.com features a gallery of political cartoons relating to the terrorist attacks of September 11th.

Greg's Digital Retouching Portfolio offers a sample image gallery where you can use your mouse to roll over images and display the original scan before it was retouched. 

In February 2004 the campaign for American Democratic candidate John Kerry faced a scandal when doctored photos of Kerry made it appear as if he shared the podium at an anti-war rally with Jane Fonda. The doctored and original photos can be found at Snopes.com.

 The Map Is Not the Road

A picture can act as a map toward greater consciousness — it can point toward things, signify things — but it is not the road itself. Until digital photography came along, most people were, and perhaps still are, as Thom Hartmann suggests, “unconsciously incompetent” about how pictures shape or construct meaning and reality. In other words, we haven’t been trained to think carefully about the power of images.

How can we trust what we see in the media in an age of digital manipulation? Can we really train ourselves to be more visually literate and consciously competent?

Even though most of us appreciate how media images can edify and inform us, or perhaps even

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save us from our personal biases, pictures are not a panacea for critical thinking. If anything, pictures aid the unconscious mind in constructing conditions of knowing the world in certain ways.

Theorist Thomas Sebeok’s claim, “The more we see the more we know and understand, and conversely, the less we see, the less we know and understand,” may be argued in an age when tampering with pictorial representations of places, people, and things appears to be more normalized as an unintended reality of technological change.

Sometimes today, the more we see, the less we know.