Digital and its Discontents

The article by Erwin Puts that I posted a link to last Thursday has not gone down at all well with our commenters, but his underlying argument—or what I believe to be his underlying argument—is one for which I have a great deal of sympathy.

I should first state that I'm not speaking for Erwin. I'm only reading the same article you can read at the link. Secondly, I have to admit the possibility that I've "overlaying" my own ideas and understandings on top of his, and that I might be conflating his views and statements with similar thoughts of my own.

But when he says that digital imaging should not be called "photography," I very much agree. I think it's a shame that "digital photography," which I consider a woeful hybridization, has gained such ground on the term "digital imaging," which is in my mind far preferable. The two are more distinct than the common wisdom suggests, in my view, and in this I think Erwin and I agree.

"Photography" has in that sense become a generic word that has outpaced its etymology, like "cc" for sending someone a copy (cc stands for "carbon copy," and refers to the way copies were made on typewriters, obviously something that is no longer directly pertinent), or "the radio dial" (when dials on radio are for the most part long gone, replaced with pushbuttons and digital displays), or any one of a hundred other examples of common idioms that have antique and outdated origins. "Photography" in my view should stand for optical-mechanical-chemical processes where the action of light is the main agent and the record is the direct result of the action of the cause, like a bearprint is the impression of the bear, in E.H. Gombrich's memorable phrase.

The argument is somewhat fugitive and the burden of persuasion difficult not because Erwin cannot express himself well (and not because I can't), but because the issue itself is fundamentally clouded. There are so many caveats and countervailing considerations. It's not a clear-cut case of either/or, and never has been. The same objections are always raised: "Photography was always subject to manipulation." "It doesn't matter how images are made." "Only the end result matters."

These arguments are correct. But only to a point.

Yes, photography was always controllable—for instance in a studio, where everything the camera is to capture can be arranged just so, or when many pictures are taken so that one "perfect" frame can be chosen. Yes, photography was always subject to manipulation; any photo 101 student remembers the photo-collages of Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, not to mention the surrealist combinations of Jerry Uelsmann. Yes, photographs have always been "made to lie," as the common rejoinder to the argument that "photographs never lie" always asserts. Yes, photographs are subjected to controls in the darkroom, all the way up to the adding or subtracting of visual elements and wholesale attempts to change the effects of the image cast by the lens in various ways.

Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away, composite picture made from five negatives, 1858

But when the argumentative haze clears, the facts left behind still persist. What is responsible for the revolution in seeing that photography caused is its insistence on recording the image cast by the lens. This caused all manner of frustration and  confusion in both photographers and viewers from the beginning and down to the present. Because no matter how much people tried to control photography—and that includes conceptually, as the many manifestos of early photography abundantly show—photography just went right on recording what and how the lens saw, never mind what human beings wanted. This included showing us things that were not the way our brains liked to conceive of them—sometimes to our delight or amazement, as in Muybridge's dissection of the motion of a running horse or Edgerton's perfect drop of milk—and many times to our dismay, as when physical objects we thought we understood were shown "out of drawing" or as visually chaotic or nonsensical, partial, or deformed. Photography never stopped insisting on yielding to us what the lens saw, whether it surprised or delighted or dismayed or mystified or displeased us, or when it simply wasn't what we expected. Every photographer has to come to terms with this, whether with a mighty intellectual effort ending in failure, like P.H. Emerson's, or in a postmodernistic embrace of the medium's subversiveness and  randomness, or something somewhere in between.

The argument is equally clouded from the other direction, because digital imaging with a digital camera and a sensor can be used, and often is used, merely to record faithfully the lens image, in much the way that film tends to do. Many "digital photographs" are not manipulated. They're not faked, or fraudulent, or fanciful. As reports of their "pretexts"—what the camera was aimed at when the exposure was made—they are just as truthful as the image any film camera could have rendered the same thing.

But, again, despite this, there's still a huge gap between the photography of direct impression and the imaging of highly manipulable and mutable pixels. The conceptual graph isn't like this:

•-------------------------------------------------------------•
film/pure                                                                        digital/impure

But it is like this:

<---objective evidence             imaginative invention--->

---------•------------------------------------•-----------------
film (direct impression)                        digital (easily manipulable)

...where "direct impression" simply refers to an optical/chemical setup that limits the conceptual reordering we can impose on the image—one that frustrates our impulse to mold and manipulate and tends to insist on its intrinsic constraints—and "digital" means a medium that is much more easily amenable to untraceable alteration, to the telling of innumerable invisible little lies (perhaps just the removal of telephone lines or the adding of a distant bird or two, or the substitution of one color for another) or the construction of the kind of blatant lies (see harbor scene below) that the new technology makes much easier to accomplish.

So what I'm saying is that yes, film photography was never pure; and, true, digital photography doesn't inherently lie. Everyone who claims either of these things is correct. But what we miss in making these arguments is the gap—I would argue, the large gap—that truly does exist between the recording medium that resists the imposition of our own human imaginations on its results, and the recording medium that (subtly or not) tends to encourage it.

_______________

If this argument so far is too theoretical for you, just consider a few examples, including a couple of things that have been published here on T.O.P. in recent weeks. Take this picture by Fay Godwin, first:

Chalk Farm, London

Or this one:

Leaping Lurcher, 1972

Really the only thing that gives either photograph its power is that, for better or worse, we really do believe that the pretext of each picture is authentic—another way of saying that the hulking bison (even if perhaps he's stuffed) really was standing there in the road, and that that amazingly graceful long dog's body really was stretched out against the sky like that, as it leapt the fence, when the shutter was pressed. Neither picture really has much to do with anything the human imagination directly craves, or would necessarily invent. (If you had a nondescript snap of a road, would you think to yourself, "hmm, needs a bison?") We really do know that with film, either picture would be difficult to fake, and in any event, why would you? Who would think of it? In both cases, the pictures are wonderful because we're willing to believe—provisionally, anyway—that they're true, that they are records of something real. This is what gives life and richness to most, if not all, of the photography I've learned to love. What it implies is that the real world is a strange and wonderful place, with wondrous sights all around us, ephemeral, shifting, but there, and sometimes caught.

Moreover, if either picture were known for sure by the viewer to be fake, they would lose a great deal of what charm they possess. (That's an assertion, not a fact—maybe it's not true for you. It's true for me, which is about all I can say.)

What photography comes down to for me is the lens image. Photography is about how lenses render what you point them at, because if you know how they work—how they "see"—you can recover from the picture real evidence of what was in front of the lens during the time the picture was made. A camera is a recording device. This connection to the world is what's crucial about photography, and it's what makes photography inherently different from all other forms of image-making or image-production. 

Remember that nice quote from the Henry Wessel video we linked to back on July 23rd: "In the still photograph you basically have two variables—where you stand and when you press the shutter. That's all you have." A few people objected to this sentiment, in one way or another. But what Wessel is really saying is that his photography is entirely about the lens image, that his pictures depend entirely on what the lens showed him at one moment from one vantage point. It's not about his imagination; it's not about "creativity" or his "vision" (a cliché I have to say I'm getting very weary of). The picture is essentially done when the shutter closes. From there, editing is a matter of recognition—recognizing what works as a picture for him—a number of "no's" and occasionally one "yes."

Contrast this to one the responses I got for my (digital) picture "The Moon and Venus" on July 18th. Mincing no words, the critique went as follows: "Right bottom corner should be corrected via imaging software. Door wall etc. not straight. Spoils the whole thing. Big job done—night, tripod, waiting etc. and...investment lost." Well, okay, another party heard from. But what's he really saying here? He's saying you're not done when all you've done is taken the picture. You still have work to do, miles to walk, changes to make. What changes? Changes to an essentially plastic, infinitely malleable original that can suppress what the lens saw and impose on the picture what the brain expects and wants to see.

There's nothing wrong with that. One isn't "better" than the other. But it's different. And here's another important point, too—do you see that it's not essentially about competing technologies? For me, if not for Erwin, it's really not about whether film is "better" or digital is "better," and it's not about how any given photographer achieves his or her aims. It's not about how the technology works. It's about the conceptual implications of the pictures. Or, you might say, the conceptual implications of the technologies as seen in the pictures. That's really the whole point. What do the pictures mean? How do they mean? What do they show, and is it trustworthy? In the second link for Thursday, you saw this picture, constructed automatically from similar pictures found on the internet, which I admit is a legitimate technological marvel, even if it never proves to have much real practical application. But however you feel about what's been done here, you can't deny that the picture itself is a lie. As we know from the article, the lower part of the bay cannot actually be seen from that exact vantage point; there's actually a building in the way. The sailboats shown in the picture were not actually there at that time. It's a fabrication, not a report. It's closer, conceptually, to Robinson's Fading Away than it is to Godwin's Bison at Chalk Farm.

How you feel about that lie is up to you. You might not care; you might consider that the entire point of the picture is to be generically picturesque and give you a warm fuzzy feeling squishing up from inside you, and that it succeeds better in that function than did the scene the lens actually reported. But I admit that I do have a problem with it. When a photograph purports to report to me something true about the world, the value of the photograph is diminished for me when the picture isn't true. I would rather that a picture not pretend to be real—if it's a creative illustration, then it should just go ahead an be a creative illustration, as many Photoshop creations are. That's better than a picture that looks like a photograph but lies like a rug.

What it comes down to, basically, is fiction versus non-fiction. (Now, resist your impulse to argue here: I've already admitted that film can be fiction and digital can be non-fiction. It's not just the medium, it's how it's used, and by whom, and how, and for what. I concede that.) I said earlier that photography is inherently different from all other forms of image-making or image-production. What that means is that it's not just the result that matters, regardless of how you got there. Photography is not like watercolors or etchings or aquatints or pastel drawings or silkscreens or oil paintings...or Photoshop illustrations, either. Naturally there's nothing wrong with any of those media. But photograph is the only one that is a recording medium, the only one that doesn't interpose the human imagination between the impartial eye of the lens and the artifact at the end of the production process, which used to be the print. It's a matter of trusting that the look of the world is sometimes richer and stranger and more wonderous than the images of it our minds would invent. That's what gives its its special place at the table amidst the rest of the visual media, even as it makes it recalcitrant and difficult to master for expressive purposes.

It can still be this way with a digital camera, sure. But still and all, we've moved quite a few steps further away from what photography has meant historically, and placed it quite a few steps closer to "mere" imaginative illustration than it was before. And there's no use denying that. Perhaps I'm reading too much into his words, but that, or something like it, is what I think Erwin Puts was getting at. And although I hardly think it's the end of photography, I also cannot really disagree.

________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Chris Y: "I read somewhere that when you roll up your sleeve after a day in the sun, the line between the covered and uncovered skin was a photograph. I thought that was interesting. It's odd how after 150 years the technology and philosophy of this thing is still always ahead of us, and we're running after it like a dog chasing a pickup...."

Mike replies: In the class one year ahead of me at photography school, there was a particularly beautiful girl who, as her final project, taped an 8x10 negative to her back and went to the beach to lie in the sun. At her final critique the next day, she turned around and took off her shirt. A perfect positive in sunburn. She got an "A". You've got to admit that's a pretty clever way to get an A grade out of a trip to the beach.

I should further add, not as a response to Chris Y's comments, that I think I've made two rhetorical errors in this essay. First, I think I underestimated the degree to which some digital photographers are still touchy about perceived insults to their chosen medium; in this regard, the title I chose, "Digital and its Discontents," despite being nicely alliterative, is perhaps too much on one side of the argument and not the other, and irritates peoples' sensitivities. Second, I'm sorry to see that so many commenters believe the argument to hinge on the terminology. That's really not the point of the essay, what we call it, the names we use. It's just something Erwin said that I responded to first. But because the essay begins with that, people are assuming that that's the whole argument or that it's the main subject of the argument. I think that in a more carefully written piece I would correct both of those didactic mistakes on my part.

Featured Comment by Stan Banos: "Yup, that's pretty much it, tied and gift wrapped, signed, sealed and delivered—not that it'll end or resolve one single thing. When you marry one traditional, time-honored image making process, photography, with a new technology that is in itself an image maker, Photoshop, the resulting hybridization is inevitable, unavoidable, and bound to please one set of in-laws at the expense of the others."

Comments

[Philip Homburg]

Well, I capture on film, but I print digitally. So if ease of manipulation is the issue then what I do cannot be called photography. Yet most of my print could just as well have been made optically.

To me the distinction doesn't make any sense. A straight print from a digitally captured image may be a much better representation of reality than any done in B/W or using Velvia.

I think it much better if we reserve the word photography for the cases where we really try to capture what is in front of the lens. And reserve (digital) image for everything that has been manipulated.

[Gerard Meijs]

Many years ago the company I work for introduced the Photo CD. I proudly showed our it during Photokina to a couple of photographers from the Amsterdam Police Dept. They looked at me, realised the implications of a digitized image and said "Thank you Gerard, no judge will ever believe our photographic evidence anymore". I do hope that photography is still allowed into courtrooms as evidence but it shows that a changing imaging technology made it very difficult to judge if the image can be used in finding "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth." Your point "you can recover from the picture real evidence of what was in front of the lens during the time the picture was made." captures the essential difference between analog and digital images.

Maybe photography follows the developments in food and the way we eat. In the past you would eat what was produced localy during a particular season. Today we eat whatever we fancy whenever we want to, food is processed and changed beyond recognition, flavours and colours are added by manufacturers. Is it good or bad? It is neither and we must accept that things have changed (and will change even more in the future) but don't say that you "cooke a meal" when you place food in the microwave. I suggest that we call this "food processing" and use the term "cooking" only when you slice the onions yourself. And learn (not) to burn you fingers while handling the saucepan.

Gerard

[Arg]

I understand what you are saying, but I don't understand why you are saying it. So, digital records like film if you use it that way, and it provides more flexibility to manipulate if you want to? Well, I say, in that case digital exceeds film as a medium. What you are noticing (with such an air of despondency) as you trawl images on the www is photographers expressing something closer to what they wanted to express all along, but were in the past restricted by film's limitations or comparative lack of ease or accessibility.

Your view amounts to a preference for film-and-darkroom because you can 'trust' more images to be unmanipulated by film photographers, and you value being given an insight to what was really there in front of the lens. That's really sad. A 'straight' photo is such a poor representation of what is in front of the lens, using it to get an insight into a real scene is like a man using a blow-up doll to get an insight into having an intimate relationship with a woman.

[Michael]

I read you as saying that, once the world becomes flooded, and jaded, by the slightly imaginary shots -- my favorite is the shark attacking the man hanging from the helicopter, which has been around here two or three times as 'amazing event'-- then the delight in the captured moment, the 'ongoing moment', as C-B is better translated, will go down the tubes.

But we can hardly recapture that innocence again anyway. The golden age is already gone.

On the other hand, the golden age is always already gone. There are, however, two consolations. First, any one of us can still capture the ongoing moment, and still put it out as such. I instance your shot of the back yard with your dog's wonky ears just in shot. Not the dog leaping the fence, but an ongoing moment all the same.

The other consolation is that we always have rules for both the making and the viewing of photos. The excitement over the news photographer who made the legs beneath the billboard disappear shows how much we still care about the rules for making photos. And the enjoyment we still get from the work of all kinds of art photographs, however they were made, still shows that we know how to view photos.

[Dion van Huyssteen]

Seems like photography using this argument is actually just the negative (or raw file).

Anything further than that requires some sort of fuzzy line that divides photograph and image, and people move it based on their own personal bias.

Come to think of it, maybe polaroid is the only true modern photography. :)

[Adam Isler]

Nothing to argure with here, Mike, though one could and, no doubt, some will if they have energy left from the last bout. But it seems to me, once you've striven to be as fair minded and balanced as you have in putting your case, it boils down to this: it's not so much that photography has changed (or that digital isn't the same medium, quite, that photography was), it's that changes in the use of the technology have altered how we look at photos.

So if I only use film and you look at amazing pictures on my web site, you'd assume their amazingness was created in PhotoShop rather than directly by the lens. So, if I'm correct, it's we who have been changed by the technology more than the medium itself (which is not to say, of course, that photographic images haven't changed also - but that it's the change in us that's more significant).

Adam

[Michael Martin-Morgan]

Phew!
Anyway, "photography" simply means drawing with light; the technology used has no bearing on this meaning.

[Hitesh Sawlani]

Change is the only constant.

Think about how the term food is understood. From raw meat from hunting animals to highly processed/refined supermarket products. They are both considered food and there isn't much effort put into distinguishing between them.

Manipulation existed on film so it shouldn't be the defining characteristic of digital regardless if it is uses or not.

[Der Norbert]

There is no such thing as one truth. Not objectively. On a subjective layer there is something one could consider as a personal version of truth, and this can affect one very much emotionally. Nevertheless this is not about technology, be it silver halide chemistry or pixels made out of bits.

Taking Henry Wessel as an example: I do like his photographs, and i feel a certain amount of "truth" inside them. Is this because there was no exaggerated manipulation after pressing the shutter? Maybe, but to me there is something more important. I feel those pictures are true because Henry Wessel succeeded in projecting his subjective layer of sensing a situation to me! And i am totally aware that a second person not being Henry Wessel, standing right beneath him and having a camera too, would not have taken the same picture, let alone having it the same impact on me!

So the question to me is not if a picture was manipulated, but whether and to which amount it was manipulated before or after pressing the shutter. In both cases many ways of manipulation are conceivable. Paying people to do something in front of a camera or talking them into doing something or placing bisons on streets are just some of the more obvious ways. If we remember Henry Wessel and his anonymous neighbor photographer it gets clearer that there have to be more subtle ways, too. I'm rather sure this difference is not only for right exposure or other technical aspects, but for something happening deep inside the photographer just before the shutter is pressed.

This leads to the point where i totally disagree with Mike's post, who claims that it's not at all a matter of what he is so tired to hear of: "vision". To me there is no such thing as an objective reality, not one that comes to my mind being unfiltered by so many aspects that it would be total rubbish to regard it as something absolute and pure. It is about vision, and it is a lot more about personal vision than it is about technique.

Again, this is just my personal truth. ;-) (Hope my english isn't too bad and i haven't totally missed my point...)

[Wilhelm]

I always thought that "photography" just meant "writing with light."

[Michael W]

I pretty much agree with you Mike. I read the Erwin Puts article a few days ago but he doesn't express himself clearly. It read like a first draft that needed a lot of work so I didn't waste much time on it. Your piece is much better thought through & clearly expressed & I think the basic point is undeniable. I don't see why there should be any controversy, except it seems like a lot of digital/flickr people seem to be overly sensitive to anything that can be interpreted as a slight on the new imaging paradigm.

[latent_image]

Well Mike, I wrote a brilliant defense of your argument, but when I tried to post it, it disappeared into the digital ether. Typical.

I remember your bear-print metaphor from your Photo Techniques days and wondered whether you still embraced it. I guess like you, I cannot be persuaded by the thousands who think otherwise that there hasn't been a fundamental paradigm shift in the transition from photography to digital imaging. I mean for crying out loud, didn't all those angel wings we saw in the first years of Photoshop signify something?

[Johnny]

Great essay, Mike, very clear. I would like to point out that photography was not invented in France in 1839, it was invented in the U.S, in 1888, by the Kodak camera. Up until then, photography was used as another way of painting, and photographs aspired to look like paintings. It was the snapshot, made possible by the Kodak camera, that created a specifically photographic aesthetic, a photographic language. We are in a similar situation with digital images. We have the basic technology, but we don't have the language yet: most digital images we have try to look like photographs. So we have this feeling that we are not in Kansas anymore, but still we don't know where we are.

[aka_lol]

The latest blockbuster movies have little to do with an ingenious plot but all to do with outdoing the last set of special effects. It is about making the audiences go ooohhh and ahhhh for as long as possible. But at least we know it’s only an illusion.

Always striving for more is human nature and Photoshop was designed by humans, for humans and is a successful product because it fills that basic human need to do, show, present, what was never done before. It can even be said Photoshop is addictive. It can easily alter reality and that appears to be a basic human need.

It is wrong to present an altered image when the audience thinks it is unaltered. I don't bother to question if a full page ad showing George Bush hugging Castro waving an American flag is real. What I would be concerned about is going to a photo exhibition where the photographer manipulates all or some of the images (I am not talking exposure or color correction) but say nothing. That is dishonest and fraudulent. With fame and ego inflation now becoming the most sought after life achievement, dishonest image manipulation will only get more widespread and make photography a dilute art form. Digital makes this type of dishonesty easier to achieve but the intention was there long before film sales started to fall.

http://www.mayarobeach.com/

[Erik Petersson]

You are quite right Mike. Digital will subtly but clearly, and in the long run, change people’s conception of pictures and representation of the reality.

Once, a relative of mine refused to receive a photograph of her elderly sister because it showed the fine lines in the sister’s face. She would probably have appreciated a flattering painting instead, as many portraits were made before photography. Maybe portraiture in the future will tend more towards flattery again.

[David A. Goldfarb]

Is the sense that film is the "recording medium" in some regard perhaps also a historical accident? I suspect the potential for the photograph to be a record of what the lens saw has moved to the foreground and back at various points in the history of photography.

There is very little retouching that can be done, for instance, with direct positive processes like the Daguerreotype, Ambrotype, or Polaroid for that matter and part of the power of the Daguerreotype comes from the fact that the image we are seeing the unique first generation image that the lens saw.

Of course before the possibility of instantaneous exposure, the variables were where you stand, when you press the shutter, and how you arrange the scene. The occasional contemporary war photographer has been known to composite images in Photoshop to make a more dramatic illustration; Brady just dragged the bodies around on the battlefield.

Once the negative becomes part of the process, however, there is a long period in which manipulation becomes the norm, whether it is adding clouds to a landscape, negative composites like Rejlander's, or negative retouching, which is often quite visible in work as early as Julia Margaret Cameron, and which an absolute requirement of professional portraiture until the 1960s.

Photography's becoming a "recording medium" I think happens at a distinctly modern moment, when film becomes fast enough for instantaneous exposures, when Weegee and Arbus dare to publish unretouched images--the truly Naked City, when the f/64 group sets aside expressive techniques like gum printing and soft lenses (though it could be argued that they were replaced by other expressive techniques in the darkroom). Maybe for those of who grew up with photography in the second half of the Twentieth Century, photography was a recording medium and it seemed always to be so.

[Tim Gray]

"But photograph is the only one that is a recording medium, the only one that doesn't interpose the human imagination between the impartial eye of the lens and the artifact at the end of the production process.."

2 thoughts/questions...

First: As long as I don't do any post processing, then its a photograph?

Second: If I do impose human imagination between the lens and the final chemical darkroom print, that's not a photograph?

[Michael]

Virtually every photograph you see in a newspaper, magazine or book if not taken digitally has been scanned digitally and sometimes manipulated before printing. So when does photography stop being photography? This whole argument can be summed up in single word HOGWASH!!!

[Player]

Since "photography" is created with light, writing with light, there are only two requirements for photography to be alive and well: lens and light, like a pen and ink.

What occurs after, any manipulation, is, to me, irrelevant, since the original negative, or raw file, still exists. Perhaps a case could be made for the death of photography if digital photography only produced jpegs manipulated by the camera manufacturers.

Raw data is what is keeping digital photography alive.

[Travis]

It's 6 am now and I've just arrived home from some of the drinking and living. But I had a thought about the "lie".

When I see recognizably digital images I no longer pause to consider whether the images have been altered or enhanced (is a lie). Because I know what Photoshop is capable of my consciousness has installed a module which makes all photography not obviously of film inherently less impressive, less interesting, less satisfying and less significant. Maybe it's just a defensive mechanism because I don't like to be made the fool.

I do prefer the appearance of a film photograph so I will admit a certain degree of bias. But photography in a general, global consciousness sense to me is dead because I don't trust it anymore(seems like not even the PJs can get it right). And personally, I'm just not impressed with what someone can do with the Filter/Adjust menus in Photoshop. I don't find much to appreciate there. That is also not particularly creative or expressive which is commonly the excuse.

In another sense, however, photography in my world flourishes vibrantly, thanks to a number of good friends dedicated to shooting film along with myself. I don't need any more than that. So, just go ahead and try to tell me that the world exists beyond my silver gelatin bubble.

[Brian]

I think it is so impressive that you have patience to respond to the hysteria with such a thoughtful and intellectually stimulating piece. I am slightly surprised however that so few of your correspondents/commenters seemed to appreciate what Puts had to say (in his idiosyncratic way). This was a serious piece and worthy of respect whether one agrees with it all or not.

[dwig]

I think your argument, as presented, fails completely. The vast majority of what the world in general considers to be "photography" fails to fit your excessively tight definition. The only image making that passes your test would be slides and transparencies.

Any and all prints ever made involve too much judgement and adjustment to ever be included under your definition of "photography". Even every Ansel Adams and Edward Weston print fails as they were manipulated in the darkroom (mostly selective lightening and darkening of various areas through dodging and burning in). Most major photographic artists have manipulated the bulk of their images in this way. Other manipulations that have been relatively common, or extremely common, with chemical printing are cropping and perspective adjustment by tilting the negative carrier and/or easel. W. Eugene Smith frequently blew cigarette smoke in front of the enlarger lens to diffuse portions of his images as he held back light from other areas.

"Photography" is imaging with light, by definition. The fact that the first practical permanent images involved chemical processes, most relying on silver, doesn't mean in any way that the only recording medium has to be of a similar chemical nature.

All this hew and cry about digital imaging is similar to that about typography that arose with PostScript printers and Desktop Publishing a quarter of a century ago. New technology comes along and allows untrained and/or poorly skilled users to create what, previously, required greate expense and years of training and/or apprenticeship. The technical craft of digital imaging is a low hurdle compared to that of chemical imaging just as typesetting with a Mac and a LaserWriter was a low hurdle compared to previous electronic and metal typesetting methods.

This pattern of the introduction of a new technology reducing the average quality of output for a period after it introduction can be seen many places. Overall quality, both technical and artistic, of common print material has ebbed and flowed over the years with recent low points during the early desktop publishing days, for reasons noted above, and recently (typically seen where low res bitmaps are accepted for ads where sharp vector art was mandated in the past). It can also be seen in cinema, as any knowledgable person who has studied film knows. The introduction of sound, color film, wide-screen, fast films, and, to a lesser degree perhaps, CGI have all triggered a lowering of standards for a period of time after their introduction. True, there are the exceptional film that doesn't follow the rule, but in general the rule holds.

[Curtis]

Mike—
I am a scientist and amateur photographer. My area of expertise is spectroscopy, in which matter is probed using light. In terms of physically what is going on, a typical spectroscopy experiment is not that different from taking a photograph. In both cases, optics are employed to image photons onto a light sensitive detector. In the good old days, the detector of choice was a piece of film, but for the past 20 years or so, digital imagers like CCDs have essentially replaced film in our instruments. While the potential for data manipulation is certainly there, most would not call into question the objective reality of what we measure. I guess the peer review process keeps us honest (for the most part). Anyway, even though film is not used anymore, we still call what we do ‘spectroscopy’ and not ‘digital spectral imaging’ or some such. I suppose if there was a way to ‘fix’ the RAW data you would feel differently? And what about the scanned film images on flickr that contribute to the composite images you referred to?

[carpeicthus]

It's a well-argued argument, but still wrong. There's nothing wrong with the term digital photography, and it is distinct from digital imaging. The important part of digital photography is still capturing light in a certain way using the mechanics of a camera. You can do digital imaging without a camera at all, just by sitting down at your computer.

This is not to mention that yes, film was faked all the time and yes, at least 99.9 percent of all digital pictures taken have not been edited in any truth-changing way.

[Ed Nixon]

"But photograph[y] is the only one that is a recording medium, the only one that doesn't interpose the human imagination between the impartial eye of the lens and the artifact at the end of the production process, which used to be the print."

Mike, I wonder if this isn't a case of wanting your cake and eating it too? It looks like you may be discounting the "Where you stand" part of Henry Wessel's model (which in the digital context, I don't believe will stand up to serious scrutiny) but also the notion that *all* art to one extent or another is a recording / reflection of (physical) reality and that the viewer has always been challenged to engage in an internal discussion & decision about exactly *how real* and in *what way* a representation exists. To confound notions related to aesthetic value with notions of 'truth' may represent the fog you talk about in this piece.

Why isn't a pencil a recording medium? Or a brush? I wonder if, as 'digital imaging' as opposed to 'photography' starts to get more traction, we won't be seeing the further evolving toward maturity of the enterprise? That is, as digital imagers (ugly term) take on full responsibility for their work as an imaginative endeavor and move away from increasing ambivalence about 'recording of physical reality.' When all is said (if not yet done), the richness of the real world doesn't exist 'out there', it is in the imaginative eye of the beholder; communicating that richness is the artist / beholder's main responsibility & challenge.

[paul b.]

Wedding Imager, Portrait Imager, Landscape Imager, Street Imager, Imagejournalist, printed image, Digital Imager, Manipulate?

[A. Dias]

At the end of the day this discussion is a futile waste of brain power. Digital recording is not any different physically than film recording. The bits that are recorded are engendered by a physical process - photons are detected, which in turn generate a current that charges a well potential,which is converted to another charge encoding its binary representation. That recording is as faithful as any other recording of the same physical resolution. But all that is moot. Most photographs worth their salt are not faithful representations of reality. Look at Ansel Adams prints - none are what was there, all are what the master envisioned. So there you have it. To say that the digital manipulation of the honest original recording "negative" is more dishonest that the chemical (albeit harder) manipulation of negatives with masks, spotting, etc., is not valid in my opinion. This is a nostalgic argument that always comes to the fore when a new technology is introduced. The faithful practitioners of the old tech always say the new one is not as good, and that the old one was the real thing. Been there, seen that.

[Gingerbaker]

I like to think of film photography vs digital photography vs digital imaging.

All three can produce images that preserve varying degrees of verasimilitude, reality.

Even film photography at its most pure subverts reality - our eyes don't "see" like a lens "sees".

Even the choice of subject is a conscious and selective artistic decision.

The line between digital photography and digital imaging is plastic, it seems to me, and within the heart of each individual photographer.

At the end of the day, I think, this whole discussion becomes more about what makes a photographer, and not so much about his tools.

[Mark McCormick-Goodhart]

An intriguing topic that is understandably on many photographers' minds these days. Just what is a photograph and what isn't? Is the pursuit of "photography" really now just a subset of the larger field of imaging? I would submit that it always was. The often quoted derivation of the word photography is "to write with light". Writing with light is inherent to all imaging processes that record electromagnetic radiation seen by the human eye. Digital photography, electronic imaging, or whatever you want to call it, has not violated the basic underlying principals of writing with light simply because somewhere in the light gathering and rendering sequence we can now apply pixel acrobatics. Yet we do have a problem that needs further clarification, and it boils down in my opinion to the inherent truthfulness of the information content that the viewer is asked to interpret when looking at the final rendered version of the image.

There are many, many factors that affect this truthfulness including the fundamental physical limitations of the recording process. B&W is the classic case and point. B&W prints fail to disclose the color information in the original scene and in that glorious "failure" liberate us to interpret the luminous and tonal beauty of the spatial information content which has been rendered. Thus, our challenge in looking at rendered images is to evaluate the truthfulness of the image information content and therefore the meaning of what we have been shown in the rendered image.

Mike speaks of the image rendered by the lens as a fundamental underlying aspect of truthfulness in the rendered image. My personal definition of photography follows a similar thought. I divide images into three categories; photographs, photo illustrations, and illustrations (i.e., paintings and drawings). For me, the final image form that distinguishes a true photograph from a photo illustration is that the final image reproduction must be the product of a single contiguous exposure to light. It can be a very long exposure or it can be an extremely short exposure (often leading to large interpretive differences compared to what a human lens-brain process would have observed), but it has to be contiguous. When we start combining exposures, combining images, adding or subtracting elements, etc., we violate the contiguous exposure rule and we end up with a photo illustration not a photograph. Its that simple for me, but now try to apply my definition and you can see that it has some interesting ramifications even with regard to what have historically been called true photographs.

Edgerton's "Milk drop" image is by my definition a photograph, the resultant product of a single very short burst of stroboscopic light. In contrast, Edgerton's image of golfer Dennis Schute is a photo illustration because it relied on mulitple bursts of light to catch the golfer's swing in multiple positions. The final result is beautifully interpretive and revealing as a photo illustration, but it is not a true photograph by my definition.

Try applying my contiguous exposure rule to other examples that Mike and others have shown, and I think you will find it pretty well sorts these images into categories I call photographs versus categories I call photo illustrations. Digital or chemical methods of imaging are irrelevant to my definition of photography although no doubt it is much easier in the digital age to end up with a photo illustration than ever before!

[yamo]

Mike,

Greetings. It seems that within the issue there is a historical perspective which effects ones' view. What if film photography had been invented after digital? Wouldn't we say, ah, interesting approach, but with capturing a limited range of light and at such low resolution, isn't this just art? I mean they use _chemicals_, for heaven's sake! We should identify this new form of media as not photography, but chemical imaging.

[Josh Hawkins]

My art history has always been lacking, but my understanding of painting was that impressionism and non-realistic renderings of scenes became popular after photography started to grow in popularity. The old medium for recording a scene was displaced by a new more efficient, more accurate medium. This allowed, maybe forced, painting to grow in different directions. To explore different methods of expression. Photographers now have that option to be painters, if they so choose.

[Dierk Haasis]

So, while we agree [hopefully all of us] that most dichotomies aren't but extremes of a continuum, the simple fact that pictures held fast on film need a further step of digitising before manipulation becomes "easy" makes a Nikon F6 a photographic instrument and a Nikon D2x something else, something non-photographic?

Whatever peculiar definition of 'photography' does one need to come up with this: '"Photography" has in that sense become a generic word that has outpaced its etymology [...]'? I mentioned the etymology before - others mentioned the historical debates of what is and what is not photography [aperture vs. shutter priority, program vs. manual, TTL vs. handheld meter and so on] - and I do not quite see how digital capture dvices changed that except in some meaningless details. curiously most current sensor arrays work very similar to film, which also captures monochrome only.

Personally I use 'digital imaging' quite often as an umbrelly to catch photography, scanning, manipulation with software, creation with software but never synonymous with 'photography using a digital camera'. Just because the manipulation of letters is much easier and more flexible with a modern word processor does not mean it isn't 'writing'. A very similar discussion, BTW, lead when computers took over from electrical typewriters, which had been supplanting manual typewriters, again just a replacement of pen/pencil*, which in turn replaced quills ... What about Johannes Gensfleisch's movable type, symbolic [i.e. Greek, Latin] instead of representational [Egyptian, Chinese] alphabets?

sorry, I just do not see how mere technology alone changes underlying structures; that's answering a question on principles with details.

*The only true Times crossword [or sudoko] solver is one using a fountain pen, not a pencil!

[Clara]

Digital or chemical, I agree with Wessel: Photography is about capturing. By default, the lens-sensor combo or lens-film combo, gives you a recorded image of something outside the camera. That you can, after, manipulate the resulting image is secondary, and, as you said, does not belong exclusively to the digital technology: chemical technology, lab work, also allowed manipulation, alteration, falsification. So, as long as we use cameras provided with a lens and a sensor, we still are within the realm of Photography. The danger is when digital manipulation may start to happen in camera (we are getting there very fast), so maybe we will soon get past the capturing paradigm to the already in camera altering-reality image making. But for the most part of the user population, Photography will remain the way of recording reality into images that now is, because most people is alien to post-processing technologies like photo editing software. The hundreds of millions of snapshooters will keep Photography safe and sound where it always has been: down-to-earth real.

[Hank Graber]

Well as the NRA is fond of saying "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" or something to that effect. Digital and analog mediums are neutral on the subject of manipulation. It's the photographer's decision to alter in some way small (cropping, dodging, contrast) or large (retouching and compositing)the image. I don't see how you can define the art of photography by the ease in which an image recorded can be altered.

[Paul De Zan]

This essay is one of the best you've ever written. I'm not sure you've convinced me that sweating over this issue is worth more than a thimble full of mule piss, mostly because there has been no reliable "truth" in photography since 1980 (if there ever was), but I love the almost physical sensation of thought that I get from reading such a serious, eloquent consideration.

What's happening here is very similar to what's happened in movies since CGI; it's the integration of the technical with the creative in a way that is positively alien to all that came before. I can't help thinking that "direct impression" vs. "easily manipulable" is really no different than "candid" or "staged" in straight film photography. Was that couple caught in the act or was the kiss part of the set up? If the end result is an image of emotional power, does it even matter?

[Bob Dales]

Does this mean the only true photograph is a Polaroid?

[Mark Silgalis]

While I appreciate the soul searching and the pangs of guilt involving the transition from film to digital, it is all BS and that is not a personal attack of any kind it is merely my truth.

Besides being a photographer, I am also a radiographer. Similar arguments have been made from the perspective of the Radiologists I have worked with. The resolution is not the same, the image can be manipulated, The inherent look of the image is different. Does the x-ray show the same detail? Yes. Does the image reveal more through it's manipulation? Yes. Can pathology be hidden or masked by not using the correct exposure techniques? Yes, but it is more forgiving than silver halide.

Now I am not saying that radiography is directly comparable to photography but the similarities are more than trivial.

Of course the essential argument being made is that of truth. And truth as with many things is in the mind of the beholder. The truth of a lens is subjective as well. Perspective, angle, zoom, contrast, shutter speed, aperture, camera, and lens all detract from the truth. The light is reinterpreted by the lens and the entire imaging chain thereafter, including the type of film that is used.

Does the introduction of a digital sensor into the imaging chain change the game? Of course, it is still the same game but the inexorable pull of technology has changed the rules.

As to the Microsoft product, that is not an issue of the honesty and truth of the photograph but of the photographer.

[Ben Marks]

Mike: it seems as if you have given this a lot of deep thought. But, I've gotta go etymological on ya here: photography=drawing with light. Photography is not a medium. Film is a medium. Oil paint is a medium. Pigment ink is a medium. Photography, by contrast, is a family of processes all geared towards fixing an image formed by light. Some of those processes are easier to manipulate than others (e.g. digital imaging vs. an 8x10 sheet of Tri-X). Photography's "truth claims" have always been a red herring; and one I believe enabled by those who originally saw it as the mechanically superior successor to painting and drawing. The rest of us just find it mentally taxing to walk around with skepticism about those truth claims fixed in our heads. Lazy lazy us. Photography cannot be dead because it is a process that people engage in every time they click a shutter -- regardless of the method by which the image is fixed. When people stop that activity and primarily go back to painting and drawing as a way to represent their visual realities - then photography will be dead.

Ben Marks

[robert e]

In my experience, the distinction (although it may be a slightly different one than the one Mike is making) seems more clear-cut and accepted among casual picture-takers and former amateurs than among photo geeks. I presume one reason is because casual shooters had little or no involvement in the processing or printing of their filmed images, let alone their manipulation, while their digital images are readily accessible for any use they can dream up, any number of times.

The topic comes up frequently because I still use film even for snapshots, which these days is a conspicuous anomaly in most circles and something of a conversation starter. As one acquaintance put it, somewhat wistfully: he used to take photographs, but now he takes "images" with a digicam.

What he and others mean is that they use this tool most often to capture raw material for web sites, blogs, newletters, desktop wallpaper, CD's and other projects, for business and for pleasure. They also use it, like their film cameras of yore, to take souvenir snapshots. Rarely, it may be used to capture carefully and expressively composed and exposed photographs, but that use seems much farther from its usual purpose than it was for their film cameras.

[ArchiVue]

I believe it's more of a cultural perception, then one of media or manipulation ease !
André Rouillé, who was cited, speaks more of the relationship with time then with manipulation!
The fact that today's digital images (wether film or ccd issued) moves much more quickly around the world then in the Times/Life/NG era, the sheer quantity of pictures that is "shared" for all to see, shifts the photograph to a mere snapshot.

Recording the "truth" was one of the main current of photography (well apart from Man Ray and al), and the esthetics came slowly for a fringe of the main stream.
Today, nobody cares about "truth", neither in art (it was never really there), nor in recording events, nor even in politics!

The still image behind the lens is the resume of the "you tube" recording... Neither are really real, just a fiction to hide the everyday world... In a sort of "Second Life" scheme, with surnatural colors, hyper-sharpening, and super wide angle viewpoint !

Is it really important ? Conceptual art in photography exists and will evolve... Phone camera's snapshots will hold the time of a memory card, family heirlooms crumbles under the sheer number of pictures...

Each generation has it's fantasies and new habits!
In some countries, writers like to write with a pen (and ink), in others they used a typewriter and a word processor today... So what ? The quality of their writings isn't changed... Or is it ?

In a time when most are used to videos as a mean to record "reality", the "still" image, sometimes called photography, has still a long way to go, whatever the supporting media...

[Mike]

I use a LF camera which allows for film plane/lens movements (unlike 35mm or DSLR formats). So what the lens "sees" is subject to "in camera" manipulation (increased DOF, perspective correction). That said, I have to agree with Mike that the digital aspect does push the art/craft of photography more into the realm of potential fantasy. I like the HCB's "definitive moment" being recorded on an unyielding medium like film. As Mike says it makes the image more believable and, for me, more enjoyable.

[Ken Tanaka]

Bah.

Like Louis L'Amour's Old West stories you've constructed a lyrical lament for something that existed, at most, only exceptionally. Photography's veracity was always interpretive. Wessel's observation regarding the photographer's sole two choices (which I think he quoted from HCB) still leave the photographer plenty of free range for interpretative, yet unmodified, "faithful recordings". For example tiny "microgestures" --the position of an eye pupil, slight head tilts, hand positions, hip angles, et.al.-- make enormous differences in how a photograph is interpreted. Many contemporary, and former, photographers use such characteristics to create images designed to induce reactions as precisely as a prescription drug. Whether such images are recoded on film or on an electronic memory device is largely irrelevant.

Photography has never been, and will never be, the sober honest witness that you (and Putts) mourn. Yes, it has been called upon to testify under oath many times. But that's hardly a guarantee against perjury. Truth and facts are the domain of science and mathematics, and even these are fields perpetually in developmental progress. Anything else, particularly any endeavor that could find itself categorized as "art", is strictly in the realm of human imagination and interpretive expression.

Forget it. Move along. Take / make / bake the images that you enjoy. Leave "truth" to politicians.

Bah.

[stephen connor]

Since "photograph" (coined by Sir John Herschel in 1839) means, essentially, "to write with light", does the material upon which said light is writing really make a difference? Jeff Wall uses, as far as I can recall, an 8x10 film camera (or is it even bigger?). Are his pictures therefore more real than, say, Michael Reichmann's? Or yours? Or mine?

Or, is it the "immediacy" that seems to lend some extra note of authenticity? Well, doesn't the very notion of "the decisive moment" imply that some moments are more "immediate" and "authentic" than others? By choosing when to trip the shutter, isn't the photographer manipulating the image as it's being made?

As for reserving "image" for everything that's been manipulated, well, there go all the photographs in the world. Well, other than those caught on transparency (hmmm, who knew that term would take on this slightly new meaning in the digital age?) film. Anybody ever print a negative straight? No dodging? No burning? None? No careful choosing of paper grade to bring out the best in the negative? Glossy vs. matte?

And, by the by, just how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

[Hello]

Since you raise the misnomer issue: photography means 'writing with light'. It does not say anything about capturing the writing using chemical or electronic means (or any other).
True photography is therefore limited to camera obscura kind of things projecting text, not images.[*]
What you call photography should be called 'chemical imaging' or, maybe, difficult-to-manipulate-image-capture.
As you may have gathered I do not share any of your concerns on this issue.
*] my greek is very hazy, it may be that graphe` means also painting. So I'll give you images if you insist.

[Hertz-Eichenrode, Hans-Jürgen]

I am with Philip in what I take as an artificially overloaded matter; it reminds me - well, please take it with the humour needed, I know quite well, that there is lot more substance in your reasonings - about the analogue versus digital-audio-discussions claiming that numbers per se cannot create "natural" sounds. Listening (out of) thousands of LPs as well as CDs by adequate gear and looking to photos of any technical origin I learned that if you take and use digital "right" the essence of music on the one and the essence of photography on the other hand are both readily there with digital as well. Lichtbild (light capture) is the German term for photo, and the starting point for photography is captured light, on sensor or film equally. Starting point for digital imagery is not necessarily light, just pixels created in a graphic program. There is no need to mix that up, especially from a romantically misleading "good times gone"-perspective blaiming digital to corrupt photography as a means of authentical expression, just because the methods to manipulate photos became more easy to use. It is in our hands to preserve the special appearance of light designed expression in the photos we create. Those photographers transforming what we all see - be it by "manipulation"- into fotos showing what they imagine when looking at those same things are the most inspiring ones for me.
Best regards
Hans-Jürgen Hertz-Eichenrode

http://www.tiny.cc/fotos

[Eric Kellerman]

Must we have a lens to create photography? What about Rayograms and the like? As far as I am concerned, the (deliberate) act of suntanning your own body, with or without strategically placed texture masking, is a photograph - it's just the the action of light on photosensitive material, after all. The fixing process has not been perfected yet, but the image usually lasts long enough to impress some people.

[Dogman]

A hardy "amen" from this malcontented curmudgeon!

Is it possible to image digitally with a photographic sense of vision? Jeez, I hope so! I just bought my first digital camera after nearly 35 years of photography. In my pursuit of knowledge about using this new contraption, all I get is the forumspeak clamor for manipulation, correction and "fixing". The new breed of photographer is in search of The Perfect Image. If it takes contrivance to achieve this perfection, that's just another step in the new process.

Dammit, HCB had sprocket hole marks on some of his pictures, ferchrissake! Eggleston, Shore and Meyerowitz have color pictures with washed out skies! Eliot Porter's colors were not always natural. So what! Photography is not about perfection and precision. Photography is about vision.

[Nicolai Morrisson]

Leaving aside the more subtle and ambiguous issues of definitions, if it's veracity you're after, digital is the inarguable "winner". (I say this as a film shooter, not as a knee-jerk defender of digital.) You can fake film, simply make whatever composite you want and re-shoot it, and you've got "proof" of its authenticity.

With digital, the camera can produce a digital signature for an image that can be verified with products like the Canon DVK-E2 and Nikon's Image Authentication Software. If a single bit is different than the camera recorded it, the verification fails.

[Carey]

Nice posts! Even though I disagree, they've got me thinking. I have a couple thoughts here.

Your distinction is more about behavior than technology. The behavior that matches your pure definition of "photography" can be achieved with either film or digital. You might raise fewer objections if you use terminology to that end.

No matter how much logical reasoning you bring to bear on this subject, the natural forces of language are working against you. The word "photography" has gained a meaning which you don't like, but it's prominent enough that you're simply tilting at windmills.

You seem to feel strongly that there needs to be a distinction between what you're calling "photography" and "digital imaging." Rather than trying to fight a losing battle against the definition of "photography", you would be better off adding words to make that distinction in contexts where it matters.

I wonder if something like "descriptive photography" vs "expressive photography" would make sense.

[chuck kimmerle]

Mike,

You seem to be drawing a distinction between pre-exposure scene manipulation and that which is done during post-processing. I'm not sure I understand the differences, as both have the ability to recreate reality in the vision of the photographer, irregardless of their methodologies. Either of the two animal images used as examples could have easily been a contrived situation, and I would wager a significant amount of money the leaping dog photo was, in fact, a "planned" photo (although I have no evidence other than my gut feeling).

But....so what? Do accusations of body repositioning devalue the Civil War work of Matthew Brady? Does the knowledge that some National Geographic photographers routinely control their subjects and scenes make their work any less influential? Why would it be any different if these "fakes" were done post capture?

That all said, I understand what you are saying, I just don't happen to agree.