Photographic Myths

When Louis Daguerre introduced daguerrotype images in 1839, society was thrilled. Gone were the days, it seemed (naively), of fabrication, subjective bias, and spin management (romantic, best-light interpretations) that artists had capriciously imparted in paintings and sketches. Soon, numerous perspectives on the new technology pervaded society. Some were:

• Seeing is believing.
• A camera is a mirror with a memory that does not lie. It provides a transparent window on the world, providing supremely accurate reality traces of “fossilized light” that mirrors nature.
• Photographers, like ancient scribes, are impartial mechanics.
• There is no human intervention between reality and a photograph. Photography mechanics remove subjectivity, ensuring veracity while banishing error.
• Photographs are real, objective, and unadorned representations of unvarnished truth and reality.

After all, the new “impartial photon scribes” mechanically captured images without bias. So, it certainly seemed like the “fossilized light” had to mirror reality.

However, as is usually the case, things were never really as they initially seemed because from photography’s birth, images were the direct result of human manipulation and intervention.

Photographic Reality

The following is true:

1. We often, but decreasingly, assume photos are authentic and have not been manipulated. The assumption varies perhaps depending on, say, whether we see images in LIFE or Time magazine versus an image in a tabloid accompanying an article titled “Chocoholic Mother Gives Birth to Sugar-Coated Baby”that, at distance, may seem somewhat unreliable, curiously implausible, or otherwise suspect.
2. Photographs seem to possess innate veracity and are extraordinarily persuasive because they seem lifelike. Photographic capacity to produce exact likeness holds persuasive power and credibility difficult for written words to rival. Photographs seem to supply incontrovertible proof, enjoying powerful presumptions of, and privileged connections to, reality. Here’s one famous example:

   On January 4, 1989, Vernon Walters, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, squelched criticism of the United States downing two Libyan MiG-23 fighters. He used an extremely blurry, virtually unrecognizable photo, supposedly proving the enemy fighters were armed with air-to-air missiles. Here, the mere presence of a photograph, seemingly any photograph, provided immense, though perhaps unwarranted, credibility.

   The power of photography is incontestable and color photographs are often even more persuasive than black and white photographs. Color advertisements, including those with color photographs, can generate 43 percent more sales, prompting the New York Times to introduce permanent color pages in its June 5, 1993, Sunday issue.

3. Image contents can redefine peoples’ perceptions and provide powerful arousal. Here are a few examples:
   • After press coverage largely precipitated adverse Vietnam War public reactions, the U.S. military prevented news agencies from directly photographing Operation Desert Storm operations.
   • Controlling image collections is sometimes politically important. A sizable uproar occurred after a California museum released its archive microfilm copies of the Dead Sea Scrolls to researchers in violation of its agreement—following years of frustrating glacial interpretation efforts by the artifact owners. Some suspected the owners subscribed to Ptolemaic self interest.
   • The O.J. Simpson defense team fought against allowing the jury to see autopsy photographs because they felt the images would coalesce jury anger towards the defendant. Reports indicated nothing prepared viewers for what they saw.
4. Photographic development and reproduction requires substantial manual intervention. Cameras have lens filters; varying film exposure, focus, and depth of field settings; and films with varying response characteristics. Film development procedures vary, and final print efforts may involve contrast enhancement, cropping, color correction, burning and dodging operations, and subjective tonal manipulation that hardly renders an image faithfully or replicates on print paper “what the photographer saw.” Finally, the printing paper and its development procedures vary as well. All these varying characteristics may be, and historically have been, used “unfaithfully” to render false images. Finally, because of subtractive color complications, ink bleed, and adhesion problems, enhancement manipulations for print production is an absolute requirement.
5. Like all news reporting, photographs usually contain ambiguity that requires significant text to explain—captions, for instance. Consequently, photography has always had a tentative relationship with reality that remains highly interpretative. Many photographs have been staged photo opportunities—mere rehearsed orchestrations.
6. Photographers have manipulated images since photography’s infancy. More aggressive practitioners resorted to airbrushing, slicing out the photograph’s center and moving the end pieces together, object removal and addition, and negative flopping (reversal). But early manipulation was usually tedious, noticeable, or otherwise implausible. Moving obstructive microphones off desks previously required significant compositing and airbrushing skill. Finally, adult magazines have vigorously airbrushed centerfold images for decades.

Photographs are not reality. They are simply two-dimensional dye or silver halide arrangements symbolizing a time-space sample which the human perception system interprets with varying success to produce best-guess associations. After all, ink-stained paper does not remotely resemble reality.

It follows that, for decades, it has been ill-advised to accept photos blindly at face value—just like many other things in life. While photography may not lie, liars have indeed used photography to perpetrate deceptions. And, digital image processing provides an even sharper tool to do so.