Before I start I first want to apologize for the ridiculous amount of quotation marks I am about to use in this post.

I feel like every year there are a few instances in the art/photographic world where people have this sudden shock that photoshop exists. There have been contests that I have posted about since I’ve had this blog where people have been disqualified for “over editing” a picture and being disqualified from a contest. And yet again we have another one from the New York Times a few weeks ago called Photoshop and Photography: When is it Real?

The article is about a contest for “photographs of the year” in Popular Photography magazine that were what the writer calls, “Photoshop Jobs”. Since a few of the photographs were “Photoshop Jobs” in the contest and people got upset about not being “capturing a moment,” they decided to make a new contest for overly photoshopped pictures. Now I don’t think “Photoshop Job” is a technical term, I think Photo - illustration may be a better term, but either way you get the point. Someone took a few pictures, placed them together on the same file, and made the scene “not real”. Now saying that is a problem all on its own so I am not even going to begin the unending conversation of “what is real” but I just want to have the photoshop conversation one last time, and then leave it alone.

Thinking about photography as “real” or a “moment captured” or some other modernist idea of what photography should be, is not, and has never been how a photograph operates. Everything the photographer does is a choice, much like these photo-illustrations are a choice. For instance, what if I were to wait for some birds to fly into a photograph instead of photoshopping them in later; would that make it more “real” and “authentic” than a photoshopped image of the same thing? I could have purchased 50 birds and paid someone to let them out of a cage and fly through a scene and “captured the moment”. But it is no more or less artificial either way. We are just trained to think that it is.

Ansel Adams used filters to make the landscape look a certain way, how is that any different than if I took a picture without a filter and then added it later on the computer? It doesn’t. But for some reason people can not get past the fact that the photograph is this cherished medium of “truth” or a “mirror to the world” and this is just not the case. Just because a computer is involved does not mean that there is any more or less manipulation than changing an f-stop or a shutter speed. Everything is a choice but with a computer it makes that choice that much more apparent and scary. WE CAN DO ANYTHING AND ITS SO EASY! AH! SCARY! But it is just the nature of the medium. Photoshop is based around the way a darkroom operates. If something is too dark you can lighten it up. If you want to crop, you can crop. If you want to move the lips from one person to another, it may be difficult, but its been done!

Many historians and philosophers have written about these ideas several decades ago and have said these things more fluently than I can. But the point is photographs have ALWAYS been manipulated, but now it is understood how it happens. It is no longer a mystery how photographers alter images. There is no need to make special terms like a “photoshop job” or even “photo illustration”; they are just photographs, that lie just like any other photograph.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 5:04 pm and is filed under photography, art, contests. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.