[Comments have been added. I also sincerely apologize: I thought I had added the Featured Comments to Monday's three posts, but I messed up somehow. They're posted now.]
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When I was a schoolteacher, years ago, a young girl was telling me a story once in the art faculty office (students were allowed to come and go as they wished). She introduced the story as something that had happened to her. Halfway through the story, she reached a detail that made it clear that everything she was relating couldn't have happened to her; but rather than get flustered, she just said, "Wait, this happened to my mom, not me," and went on telling the story. Why not? All that the inconvenient shift of perspective did was put the witness at one more remove. No biggie.
One of the most interesting articles I've read recently (I read a lot of articles—too many for sanity, probably) is "You Are Not Who You Think You Are" by David Brooks, in The New York Times, Sept. 2, 2021. Since you may not have access, a few key takeaways:
"'It turns out, reality and imagination are completely intermixed in our brain,' Nadine Dijkstra writes in Nautilus, 'which means that the separation between our inner world and the outside world is not as clear as we might like to think.'"
"We grew up believing that 'imagining' and 'seeing' describe different mental faculties. But as we learn more about what’s going on in the mind, these concepts get really blurry really fast."
"Observation feels like a transparent process. You open your eyes and take stuff in. In fact, much or most of seeing is making mental predictions about what you expect to see, based on experience, and then using sensory input to check and adjust your predictions. Thus, your memory profoundly influences what you see."
It was interesting to me to notice, during the digital transition, how blithely most people dismissed the ease with which we could fake visual elements of digital pictures. Their standard argument was to point out that photographs had always been manipulated and that therefore nothing had changed. A specious argument; it whitewashed the fact that images had become orders of magnitude easier to manipulate, and that the manipulations had become greatly more difficult to detect. Even done with great skill and great care, darkroom manipulations still in most cases left telltale signs, if you knew what to look for. That's not to claim that optical/chemical photography functioned perfectly as evidence. Far from it. And it doesn't make a value judgement as to which of the two is "better" or "best," which is what people defending digital seemed most anxious about back then (for a short period during the transition, optical/chemical photography retained greater prestige). There are obviously advantages and disadvantages to divergent techniques.
But they are quite different, and we downplayed that, almost willfully. We didn't want to believe there was any difference except that things had gotten easier/better. If it were up to me, though—as I said many times back in the early days of digital, to deaf ears—I would never have transferred the word "photography" to digital imaging. They're enough different that they each deserve their own name. Calling digital imaging "photography" reminds me of George Foreman, who named each of his five sons "George"! But then, that's the way language works too—movies are still "films" and the act of making them is still "filming." Another example you kinda have to love is that we still say we "dial" the phone, but young people presented with a dial phone, cold, sometimes can't figure out how it operates!
My father invited me out to lunch once and asked me to settle a dispute. He claimed that a photofinisher had scratched a negative of his, and he wanted compensation. I was expected to support his case. At issue was what appeared to be telephone lines in the corner of a negative of a landscape. He claimed they had to be scratches because there had been no lines (or wires, or cables, or whatever they were) there in the scene—he had been there, and therefore, he knew—he was a primary witness and therefore had the last word on the subject. I was, at the time, already a bonafide expert in darkroom technique, enough that I knew what I knew and knew what I didn't know. I examined the negative and confirmed that the lines were imaged in the film, and weren't scratches. They had been there in the scene.
Not good enough. He still insisted that he was there, and he knew there were no telephone lines there, "as surely as I know you are sitting here at this table." By testifying otherwise, I joined the ranks of the enemy, so I had to come under assault too, which quickly shifted, as usual, to ad hominem—so for the second half of that lunch I had to withstand a continuous stream of withering fire about my defective education, the deficiency of my supposed expertise, the idiocy of anyone who would take my word for anything, and the rest of the catalogue of my manifold faults, which he kept at the ready for all situations in which I expressed any opinion independent of his own. (The underlying problem was that for him, it was axiomatic that he was always right, no matter what. It never made the slightest bit of difference how wrong he might be.) Nowadays, of course, it would be less than trivial to remove the telephone lines in post and bring the picture into concordance with my father's report of reality—no compensation from the poor put-upon photofinisher required. (No photofinisher required period, come to that.)
My point is just that optical/chemical photography tended to shade more towards giving impartial evidence of the visual world, although it did so imperfectly, and digital imaging more readily allows us to show the way we and our brains wish reality to be, although that doesn't mean it can't render an accurate report of the lens image. From the first, photography insisted, rebelliously, that we should see the visual world with traces of the same chaos and confusion as our eyes see it before our brains get a hold of it. Most humans, apparently, always resented that about it. We like digital+Photoshop better.
Anyway, go check out that article, if you have access to the World's Best Photography Magazine. I've always been fascinated by how our brains see, and the degrees of separation between the witness and me.
Mike
Book o' the Week
Photography, The Definitive Visual History by Tom Ang. This is a book that can't exist—it's too much work to put it together, like several others I know of (I'm looking at you, Q.T. Luong). Amazingly, it exists anyway. A brightly-lit shop window for the attractions of photography—a whirlwind tour of people, cameras, and pictures. The author still has time to be an accomplished travel photographer, although I don't know how.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
s.wolters: "'One eye sees, the other feels' —Paul Klee
"After reading this article yesterday I watched a documentary about Koos Breukel, a Dutch photographer well known for his beautiful portraits. Het oog dat voelt (the eye that feels) is its title, with thanks to Klee’s quote above. In 1992 Breukel was involved in a terrible car accident that nearly cost him his life. His right eye was damaged severely, fortunately it could be operated. But this made him aware that when photographing he used both eyes in a different way. Left looking through the viewfinder for the technical part, right for overviewing the total situation. Breukel: 'It’s all about concentration and at the same time knowing very well what you’re doing. That’s the main disadvantage with digital. You tend to keep on clicking while there is no concentration at all. In the past you saw the same with 35mm cameras equipped with motordrives. With five frames per second many photographers thought that at least one of them should be okay. And then they found out that none of the frames was usable, because they had not looked well enough, but just had pushed the button.'
"Here is Koos Breukel’s work."
John Camp: "If you'll allow me a comment that is a bit longer.
"Years go, I was playing golf with two friends I'll call Bob and Sue, not their real names. One slight downhill fairway ran along a street that was on the other side of a chain-link fence. Sue, not a great golfer, sliced her tee-shot over the fence into the street. At about that moment, a car came around a corner and the driver, for some reason, stopped the car, got out, and (it appeared to me) looked at his front tire, then got back in his car and drove away. But Bob said, 'That guy picked up your golf ball and drove away!' And Sue turned to me and said, 'Did you see that? That guy picked up my ball and drove away.' I said, 'No he didn't. Your ball is rolling down the street.' I pointed at the ball rolling down the street. Neither one looked. They just repeated to themselves, as though they witnessed a miracle, that the guy had picked up her ball and had driven away. But you could actually see the ball in the gutter of the street, slowly rolling downhill. As we walked down the fairway pulling our golf carts, they kept talking about the incident. I had watched the ball from the time she hit it, to the time it landed, to the point where it stopped rolling down the little hill. When we were directly across from the ball, I pointed it out again, but they said that couldn't be her ball, because the guy...etc. I gave up, and started adding details to the incident—that the guy had given us the finger before getting in the car. That the ball may have hit the car and we were lucky to have gotten away with it without a confrontation, and so on. Those details have now become part of the story, which I revive every time I see them. 'You remember the time we were playing golf and the guy gave us the finger...' and so on. They remember it all, including the added details.
"On another occasion, I was having a casual newsroom conversation with a group of other reporters, and I said I kind of wished my family could afford to live on a lake, because I thought kids who lived on lakes early learned all kinds of interesting responsibilities about taking care of themselves—being careful around water, learning to swim, maybe messing with outboards, etc. A friend of mine who hadn't been part of the conversation later told me that one of the participants had told him that I said I wished my kids had grown up on a lake so they could be around rich people.
"Reality is a construct. That's why global warming is either real or not, for you, depending on your political views."
Mike replies: The reason you observed more closely is perhaps that you were (or had been) a reporter, and the objective of reporters is to resist the allure of the fanciful story and be more open to the likely truth. Like observational skills as photographers, that is a skill that can be practiced and nurtured. Something similar is true of editors, who must hone the skill of "evaluating competing claims"—a skill some ordinary Americans of today grievously lack.
David Dyer-Bennet: "The mutability of memory is a hard thing to come to terms with, because once that's suspect everything about my history is suspect."
Peter Croft: "Yes, I've been thinking recently about the ads for software that can 'replace the skies' at the click of a button, or amp up the contrast and colour, or smooth the skin and remove blemishes and so on. The examples they show are distortions of reality. This is not photography. If the sky has been replaced in your picture, then it's not a real photo. If the skin is smoother than real life, then it's not a true photo. I don't mind using a tone curve to lighten shadows or restrain highlights, and I sometimes increase saturation, but that's generally as far as I want to go. Except I'll smooth the skin for my female friend."
John Shriver: "One of my great aunts married Harry Grogin, originator of the faked news photograph."
Mike replies: Excellent example of "darkroom manipulations still in most cases left telltale signs." One glance at that top photo and I know something's off. But sometimes I find myself getting taken in at first glance by what I later figure out is probably pretty extreme digital manipulation.
Ken Owen: "Re pesky telephone lines: did no one revisit that troublesome location to settle the argument?"
Mike replies: The photo was taken on one of my father's (many) trips to his beloved France—from the top of a ski hill off-season, if my visual memory is serving me well here—and at the time of our lunch he was back in D.C. where he lived at the time.
As a writer, this sort of thing is bothersome: a fact which could be checked, except that the cost in both time and money would be completely unreasonable. For another project, I recently wrote about a series of Colonial headstones I discovered on a Maine hilltop many years ago, which together told a story. I'm pretty sure I could find that place again, and I'm pretty sure revisiting the headstones would revise my memory significantly, certainly in the exactitude of names and dates. But there's just no way I can undertake the project of fact-checking it—far too time-consuming and expensive for what I'd get in return. Getting it right, though, would be the difference between reporting and storytelling.
Anyway, what's to say the scene would be the same when one got back to check? A former girlfriend was a photographer for The Washington Post. She also did graphics for local television news. She was assigned to photograph the last one-penny parking meters in D.C.—there were five of them, in a specific known location. But she procrastinated, and when we got there, the parking meters were gone! Cut off at pavement level, as if with a Sawzall. So we had to research the yard where old traffic lights and signs were taken as junk, and search the yard to find the meters. This we did. Then we drove one of them back to the site where it had lately been. What her picture didn't show was me, lying supine on the sidewalk, holding the parking meter vertical on my stomach so she could take her pictures of it! She did not tell her editors; I've always wondered if a scrupulous editor would have allowed or disallowed that photo as news, if he or she had known the circumstances. As it was it was probably okay, because it was going to be one of those illustrations you see over the shoulder of the anchorperson while he or she is presenting the story on TV.
Dillan: "Today's most significant event: I learned that George Foreman named all five of his sons 'George.' This is something that I will never forget."
Joseph Kashi: "Hi, Mike. I have to agree with you. Not everything has to be 'art'; sometimes we need real evidence that we can trust and verify, as happened with you and your father. Photography is important as potentially more detailed and accurate evidence, if we can show that the original image file has not been manipulated inappropriately. There are serious forensic efforts underway for some years now to provide that level of analysis, but the ease of changing metadata(!) complicates that. I and other trial attorneys have run into situations where an evidentially important digital image has been altered, luckily so far by ham-handed amateurs, but there's always tomorrow. It's been a big enough problem that I've presented over the past several years at several continuing education legal sessions to other attorneys and judges about how to spot some of the more obvious faking (metadata erasure, inconsistent lighting, weird perspectives, etc.). Wet-process photos were, as you note, hard to fake, but it's been done, occasionally well. Digital photography does have the potential to be similarly hard to fake with fakes detectable, but I'm not sure that the technology's quite there. Ultimately, we need live witnesses to testify that the photo accurately depicts the scene. In the case of you and your father, you could have gone to the scene and simply taken a look and a later photo."
Kenneth Tanaka: "So, in brief, chemical photography = ink, digital photography = pencil? Hmm. Well, yes, I see the concept."
Iwert: "In reply to Kenneth Tanaka, more like watercolour (unforgiving) and oil paint (one adds layers and can alter a lot). Pencil isn't to be used with an eraser, that is a common misconception. Only when doing technical drawings, but even there the art is to not use the eraser (it is time loss, and I'm a lazy person). Once you use an eraser you allow for mistakes. leave it out and one makes fewer mistakes. Being a teacher in hand drawing at an architecture school I constantly see this simple reality confirmed. This goes for photography as well, and once it is in your mind it works as good for digital as for analog. It is more in the mind ('I can alter/adjust later'), than in the technique."
Frank Hamsher: "Just saw a documentary Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time (Jigsaw Productions). It was a two-part documentary. The first episode talks about the photo that became the cover of Crosby, Stills and Nash's first album. It was the photo that showed the three gentlemen sitting on the porch of this abandoned house. When the photographer developed the negative they all noticed that the picture showed the three sitting in the wrong order (Nash, Stills, Crosby). They went back the next day to shoot another picture with them all sitting in the right order. When they got there the house had been bulldozed. The original picture was used."
