The camera never lies. Unless the shot’s been staged, taken using a filter, or the image has been transformed using Photoshop.
Photographers have always been able to doctor images but rapid advances in technology and lower production costs have made image manipulation easier, faster and accessible to just about anyone.
While this development has been good news for photographic artists, it’s opened up a Pandora’s box for photojournalists who, according to the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), “have the responsibility to document society and to preserve its images as a matter of historical record.”
The problem for photographers trying to document reality is twofold.
First, their image could be subject to scrutiny for its authenticity on suspicion that they have doctored it. And second, editors could authorise the doctoring of images, which in turn reflects on the men and women who are out there capturing the original photographs.
Either way, according to Bruce Goldfarb doctoring images has a negative impact on the legitimacy of the media’s claim to truthful, accurate reportage.
It is now well known that the image that portrayed the ‘historic’ 2002 meeting of then-President Clinton with Cuban premier Fidel Castro was fake. Journalists had witnessed the event but no photographer had been allowed to capture it. The response of editors after the ‘magic picture’ needed to sell the event was to make one up. Whether these sorts of actions are morally acceptable is a matter for serious debate.
Images, and for that matter false images are a powerful weapon for those who would argue that history offers a slightly less than an honest account of events. The impulse to censor the visual arts predates photography by millennia. Plato talked about the need for censorship, whilst conquering armies and religions had no hesitation in doctoring the art of the civilisations they had conquered. Even Michelangelo’s Last Judgement was touched up with fig leaves, and now we cannot pick up a newspaper or magazine without coming across doctored images, many of which are not acknowledged as such.
The knowledge that photographs can be made to lie, is a smoking gun extremists can use and say, ‘See, they lied about that, so they can lie about anything.’ Deniers of the Holocaust for example, have claimed in the past that the photographic evidence from the death camps was fabricated.
In Serbia in 2002, authorities were forced to shut down an exhibition by American photographer Ron Haviv covering the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The belief that Haviv’s photographs were ‘not true’ was embraced by many who were unable or unwilling to be confronted with a visual account of the conflict that erupted following the disintegration of the Balkans. And a radical minority was able to censor the historical record by ensuring it remained unseen by the majority – on the basis that photographs can tell lies.
In the same way our cynicism regarding the way truth can be manipulated, coupled with our expectations of those in positions of power to be less than honest and the knowledge that it is easy to doctor a photo, can fuel jibes at their expense.
It seems that the increasing prevalence of doctored pictures in the public domain could cause us to reflect that nothing we see is necessarily ‘real’. Perhaps the lesson then is simple. Not only should we not believe everything we read, but we must take each photograph with a pinch of salt, too.
