A Matter of Perspective

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the manipulation of digital photos, sparked by the recent controversy over the whereabouts of Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales. In case you’ve been living under a rock, or simply don’t care, the conversation boiled up after the Palace released a (U.K.) Mother’s Day photo of Kate and her children that was later discovered to have been digitally altered. Royal watchers were aghast (or at least pretended to be), using the manipulation of the photo to float theories that Kate was deathly ill as a result of a recent surgery. Because, the stories went, why else would you manipulate a photo, other than to conceal the truth?

But what interests me, more than the latest tale of Palace intrigue, is what do we mean by truth? We often think of truth as something that is objectively determinable, like the molecular weight of carbon. But some truths are subjective, and depend on your point of view. When it comes to photography, truth has always been a matter of perspective. Things as basic as where you stand and what you choose to point your lens at will change the “truth” about what was in front of you when you pressed the shutter. As will the photo you select to share, and how you edit it.

In the debates over Kate’s photoshop skills there is a repeated assumption that visual manipulation is something new that fundamentally alters how we understand photographs. In a recent article about the controversy, for example, Associated Press reporter Deepti Hajela writes: “[I]n a world where the spread of technology makes photo manipulation as easy as a tap on your phone, the idea that a visual image is an absolute truth is as outdated as the daguerreotype.” The article goes on to quote U.C. Berkeley journalism professor Ken Light, who opines that “[t]he role of photography has been to witness and to record for the moment,” and worries that the ease of visual manipulation “frays the fabric of the culture tremendously in the moment but also for the future.” Hajela echoes Light’s comments: “This Wild West of image-altering abilities is opening new frontiers for everyday people – and creating headaches for those who expect photos to be a documentary representation of reality.”

What comments like this miss is that even straight photographs are the result of visual manipulation, starting with when and where the photographer chooses to place themself, what they choose to include in, and exclude from, the frame, and what lens and camera settings they use to capture the image. A photographer may position themself to avoid an unpleasant background that detracts from the scene. Perhaps they use a long lens to compress elements in the frame, causing them to appear closer to one another than they are in reality. Or maybe they select a slow shutter speed to create the illusion of movement. Whether or not the photographer chooses to further manipulate their image in post-processing, they have already manipulated the photograph by choosing what to include in the frame and how to capture it. The resulting photograph depicts what the photographer subjectively saw as much as it reflects some objective “truth” of what was actually in front of the camera.

Take the iconic view of Yosemite Valley from Tunnel View: El Capitan on the left, Bridalveil Falls to the right, Half Dome in the far distance, a carpet of pine trees below. But nearly every one of these photographs was taken by someone standing shoulder to shoulder with other photographers at the edge of a small parking lot, just steps from a busy road running through the park. What is the “truth” of this image? The bucolic and apparently isolated scene depicted in the photograph, or the crowded viewpoint from which it was taken?

What is the difference, then, between placing yourself in a position where a distracting element is not in the frame, and removing the element later, in post-processing? Reasonable minds may differ about what is appropriate to do when editing a photo, but the notion that the ability to rearrange elements has somehow changed the way that photographs are, or should be, perceived, is simply incorrect. If Kate Middleton really did pose for a photograph with her children on Mother’s Day and looked as she was depicted in the photograph, does it really matter that some minor elements were altered to improve the look of the photo? Is that really much different from dodging or burning areas of a photo in order to draw attention to or hide elements in the scene? Even if Kate combined different frames from the same photo session in order to show each subject in their most flattering light, how is that different from combining multiple frames to even out lighting (as in HDR processing) or provide edge-to-edge sharpness (as in focus stacking)?

But what if Kate was photoshopped into the image from another photograph taken years before? That just feels different. Like the difference between sky replacement and HDR. The difference between deception and truth. Which brings up the main point: At the end of the day, the “truth” of the photo does not lie in how it was edited. It lies, instead, in what you say about it. And this may be the real problem with Kate’s photo. The Palace just announced that she is being treated for cancer, which raises the question of whether the photo it released on Mother’s Day was current, as it claimed, or an older image being presented as if it were current. We don’t (yet) know the answer to that, but in either case the truth of the photo has nothing to do with how or whether it was edited, as the recent AP article suggests.

To be fair, Hajela and Light were commenting on the role of photography in journalism, where a published image is presented as a literal representation of the truth. But even so, a photograph selected for publication in a newspaper or magazine cannot help but reflect the photographer’s (or reporter’s or editor’s or publisher’s) point of view, whether or not it also conveys some objective truth about the scene that it depicts. The editor selects a photo because it best illustrates the story that it accompanies, not necessarily because it provides the most accurate view of the scene. And the photographer on assignment probably had a pretty good idea through past experience of what the editor was looking for, which likely affected what they chose to shoot. Still, given the ease of digital manipulation, the news media has good reason to put guardrails on the type of post processing that is permitted of photos they publish.

When it comes to photography as a means of artistic expression, however, there is little reason to object to the artist’s use of available technology on grounds that it distorts the objective truth of the image. As photographic artist Guy Tal has written: “for photography to serve as a medium for artistic – subjective – expression, artists must knowingly and deliberately, at least to some significant degree, overcome, transcend, and depart from photography’s default mode of objective representation.” Digital editing programs are just another tool in the photographer’s basket – along with cameras, lenses, filters, f-stops, exposures and all the rest – that allow them to express their interpretation of the scene, and convey their experience to the viewer.

Which brings us back to the photograph at the top of this post, which I made last June. I pulled into the Tunnel View parking lot early one morning and was greeted with a scene out of a storybook. Refracted rays of light streaming into the Valley, lacy ground fog floating among the trees, Bridalveil Falls thundering with spring snowmelt, the fresh scent of rain in the air. It felt as if I was looking out at an enchanted forest. When it came time to process the image, I sought to capture that feeling. I edited the image in a way that I hoped would show the mythical nature of the forest, express the awe and reverence I had in the moment, and share what I experienced, while still preserving the integrity of the scene.

And that is my truth.