Chapter 20
Social Issues

What This Chapter is About

Visual information is essential to all of us because it provides us the majority of our worldly knowledge and understanding. Indeed, visual perception deficiencies can cause considerable property damage and personal injury. In one instance, color blindness precipitated a major 1996 railroad disaster.

By now, it should be painfully obvious that digital images are pixel mosaics that growing numbers of computer users can shuffle and reflow with arbitrary undetectability. Because of this, digital image processing introduces new recombinant realities that the public regards as indistinguishable from photographic “reality.”

Motivations for altering images vary. However, in the final analysis you should recognize that image manipulation is considered a particularly heinous practice in any professional or social arena that relies on images to represent truth or fact. Consider that U2 spy plane photographs over Cuba precipitated an international confrontation with Fidel Castro who already, unknown to the United States, possessed a handful of tactical nuclear weapons. Here, image truth was paramount.

There are numerous instances where digital manipulation of photographic images appear to have eroded the credibility of governments, complicated court cases, and weakened public confidence. It would be a shame to allow someone inconvenienced by a Tiananmen Square youth stopping an armored tank by standing in its way to dismiss an authentic image as a fake. David King’s The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia indicates how useful Joseph Stalin regarded image alterations.

While your digital images may not possess such portent, it is important to reconsider carefully before manipulating images that you later assert are factual. This chapter discusses a few of the more pressing considerations that are emerging as digital image processing becomes increasingly accessible. Professional photographers have thought about the matter at length. So, it likely serves us well to consider the matters they have grappled with.

Level Set

On February 2, 1989, a top secret Swedish Air Force JAS-39 Gripen fighter aircraft crashed while landing at Lindkoping Airport during its sixth test flight. Most folks would have wanted to witness the dramatic scene, just like the Swedish television camera crew that filmed the action. The sight was unforgettable, with flying dust generated as the plane violently tumbled about before coming to rest. The pilot escaped.

A few hours later, four digital images flashed onto television sets and onto news wires. They were memorable indeed—not just because they accompanied the crash description, but because the images were not from crash footage. They were digital image composites constructed by Alf Jansson from verbal eyewitness reports from the film crew.

Because the Swedish Air Force had temporarily confiscated the crew’s film, Alf Jansson created fictional images from earlier test flight footage and a file photo. (If you looked carefully, the sun shone on the side of the wing facing away from the sun.)

To ensure the images would be recognized as human creations, the creators thoughtfully indicated the images were digitally produced and came from computers when they placed them on international news wires. Problem was, in 1989, few folks realized what that meant. So, when the images appeared in several Swedish newspapers in Finland, many readers simply accepted the images as authentic.

Fictional photo illustrations created by Alf Jansson in an age of digital imaging innocence, courtesy of Aktuellt-Sveriges Television AB.

This occurred despite urgent attempts by the television station that created them to get the fictional “photo illustrations” replaced with authentic ones that were available a few hours after the fictional ones were released. The problem was, the fictional images were too plausible and lifelike.

In a nutshell, such situations, unintentional or otherwise, appear to erode photographic credibility, causing problems in various court cases and in numerous other settings. Without a doubt, digital image processing has securely introduced a sharp-edged technology that cuts deeply in many directions. Like all technologies, this sharp edge can be applied in various situations with varying intents. To understand the realities and possibilities for abuse, we begin at photography’s inception.

Actual crash images, courtesy of Swedish Television (SVT)