Conclusion

Digital imaging provides a new and exciting format with far-reaching implications for visually intensive cultures. It provides the potential to blend and blur reality and fiction within creative, historical-revisionist arenas. Sufficient skill impedes determining whether images are accurate renderings, recombinant fantasies, or creative illusions. Because image editing is becoming pervasive, it forces us to recognize some photographic tampering is inevitable. Alterations will range from innocuous enhancements to intentional deceptions.

For convenience and efficiency reasons, darkrooms as we know them are dwindling and may disappear in many cases. So it is difficult to predict the degree to which we can trust images as we do photos that are produced differently. However, it is naive to believe that film-based photography has ever been exempt from manipulation.

Photojournalists and the U.S. military have wrestled with the question of whether altering an image is unethical if it produces a result identical to a different camera angle or time shot—sometimes called a “retroactive photographer repositioning.” The military prohibits it but in civilian life, the policy varies by periodical, organization, time, and location.

The post-photographic era dramatically increases image forgery possibilities. Practitioners can easily insert and remove image elements within images, then combine, transform, copy, and distribute the results. Once mutants are distributed, the variants can endure much like a computer virus. Because digital images and their mutations have no negatives, they leave no trail, so their origin and lineage is untraceable.

A natural reaction is to search for defenses to endure the onslaught. One perplexing Columbo television episode depicts a villain who asserts innocence by using a dated and time-stamped police vehicle speed-trap photograph showing him speeding in his automobile. This impartial evidence, directly from the police, seemingly places him miles from the crime scene. Columbo solved the case by noting the driver’s nose shadow lay in a different direction than shadows outside the speeding automobile. From this, he deduced a photographic mask of the villain covered the accomplice driver’s face.

In this instance a subtle photographic internal inconsistency, the shadow, revealed fraud. Thus, diligent scrutiny is a primary, though diminishing, defense against image manipulation. Another is eternal vigilance, and for this effort, we can thank the photojournalists who are the issue’s watchdogs. So in the final analysis, your source of photographic truth remains with the publisher—also your source of written truth.

Like liberty, society can decay incrementally through gradual erosion. But many professional photographers recognize the potentially slippery slope that lies ahead. Trust, truth, liberty, and authenticity are no small matter. Clearly, the bell tolls for all of us as various advocacy groups increasingly question authentic images they consider inconvenient such as those from Nazi death camps.

It is a certainty that many future image fabrications will blatantly promote self-serving agendas designed to engineer perceptions. And, technology advances will make image fabrication increasingly trivial and difficult to detect. Because of its nearly infinite mutability, digital image processing does challenge truth and authenticity. Can you believe what you see? Responsible photojournalists hope so. But, caveat emptor when viewing images of unknown origin or lineage.