Photography

The Truth About Reality (and Why Photography is Alive and Kicking)

June 26, 2009 June 26, 2009 Photography’s obituaries have been popping up with increasing frequency these days. Photoshop guru Martin Evening jokingly refers to the new Content Aware Scaling feature in CS4 as “the death of real photography.” In a more serious vein, Peter Plagens posed a question in a recent Newsweek essay that I’ve been asking myself for years– “Is Photography Dead?” He laments the fact that digital technology has led contemporary photographers into a world of make-believe, one where “reality” is often defined by their fictive imaginations powered by Photoshop skills instead of their truthful observations. In his view, we are moving away from what he sees as our traditional role as "truth-bearers" toward a postmodernist sensibility fueled by easy and popular access to digital cameras and software. He sees it as nothing less than a struggle for photography’s very soul. And so do I, in a way. But I’m actually a little more cautiously optimistic than Mr. Plagens. I’ve come to the conclusion that the more pertinent question we should be asking ourselves, “is digital photography alive?” – which begs the answer - "of course it is, if you want it to be." To understand where I’m going with this, you first have to consider what one self-help cult I got roped into joining by an ex-girlfriend used to like to demand of its adherents way back in the 1980’s. You have to understand and accept “The Truth About Reality”. Photography has never been about “truth” or “reality,” and anyone who believes otherwise probably sees the film-versus-digital debate in far more starkly divided terms than I do. Photographers are visual editors, and the very existence of the camera’s viewfinder or LCD preview proves how and why. In use, that innocuous little window or glowing screen is anything but ambivalent and all-inclusive, and civilization has been manipulated by it since the first photographer tried to figure out at what exactly, to point the contraption it was attached to. Using it to subjectively frame the world in combination with our all-too-human proclivities toward empathy, revulsion, and awe results not in the photograph itself stating, “Here is the truth,” but rather the photographer proclaiming, “Here is the truth I saw.” The viewfinder is an exclusive device; we use it to bring order to THE ENTIRE WORLD by excluding everything that doesn’t belong in our photographs. We edit, even the purest purists among us, every time we choose to point the camera HERE instead of THERE. We have always done this to simply eliminate options, thus manipulating our images in a way designed to elicit a particular response. Photographic composition is a wonderful puzzle palace of tension driven by a constant subjective analysis of what to exclude, always working toward what Edward Weston described as "the strongest way of seeing.” But make no mistake about it– whether editing in the camera, in the darkroom, or in Photoshop, we manipulate not only our images, but our viewers as well. The rightness or wrongness of that is really only a matter of degree, so, in my view, Plagens misses the boat with the “truth” argument. My problem with what we call photography these days is about how much thinking we think we have to do. The overwhelming menu of options offered to us by digital cameras and software can be either inclusive or exclusive to the point of becoming occlusive. If we're not careful, we wind up spending far too much time considering way too many options, and in my opinion, increasingly too much of all of it after the fact. Henri Cartier-Bresson once said something along these lines: “Photography doesn’t take brains. It takes sensitivity, a finger and two legs.” We’ve been led to believe that photography does take brains, and when it comes to the back-end processes that digital technology has made so tantalizingly accessible, it’s becoming harder and harder to not feel like a nitwit. Here at CDIA we remind all of you that Photoshop is not a verb, and stress how important it is to use it carefully and well in conjunction with good lighting and exposure, and all the other skills necessary to "get it right in the camera" and blah, blah, blah. In the Photographic Seeing / Composition and Design module, I tend to take it a little further and ask you to pretend, for a little while at least, that it’s 1989 and Photoshop is not only not a verb, it’s not even a word because it hasn’t been invented yet (that generally goes over like a lead balloon). Be honest– how many of you wind up “Photoshopping” the living daylights out of what should have been more clearly perceived pictures in the first place? When asked by a student, “How do I get rid of the telephone pole growing out of the top of this guy’s head?” my answer used to be, “Pay more attention to the visual relationships between EVERYTHING in the frame next time, that’s how.” Nowadays, I still say that, but then I have to go ahead and show you how to get rid of it anyway. It feels as if the perception of photography in 2009 has more to do with the Clone Stamp and Patch Tool than it does with learning how to record what we see clearly with a camera. It's why I wonder if what we should be asking ourselves is not whether photography is dead, but whether digital photography is alive. Being alive, even when practiced diligently, is an imprecise exercise in unpredictability, intuition and faith, guided by an inarticulate certainty. The aspect of photography that I fell in love with decades ago is just like that; it's alive and well and always will be whether I use a digital camera and Photoshop or not. Somehow, though, when we weren’t looking, the simple process of picture-making became over-thought and over-done, and when that happens, the way to correct it is to apply restraint. Unfortunately, restraint isn’t one of the great new features of Photoshop CS4. Wrapping up the Newsweek essay, Plagens quotes photographer Lisette Model as saying, “Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest” (think about that the next time you see the 4-year-old uploading photos to her laptop in the recent Microsoft TV spots). But Jerry Uelsmann, the guy who’s been brilliantly making Photoshop-like composite photo illustrations with multiple film negatives in the darkroom since the 1950’s, really gets to the heart of it. “I certainly don't feel threatened by the computer”, he once told an interviewer. “It's a tool. It's another way of making marks. I figured out pretty early, even in the darkroom, having too many options is counterproductive to the creative process. The computer is the king of too many options.” And maybe that's the point of all this– too many options may be just that, too many options. The truth be told, photography isn’t dead, it’s simply confused. Randall Armor is Associate Director of CDIA’s Professional Photography program.