Photography and Deception
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| My favorite photoshop from the Iranian missile photoshop controversy. This image was submitted to Boing Boing photoshop entry (boingboing.net) |
In the binaries of truth and fiction, real and imagined, and
valid and false the photograph is often initially placed on the side of the
true, the real, and the valid. Perhaps because a photograph is the actual
expression of light during an instance in time and because visually it
represents the world in a way that mirrors the way in which we physically see
or even perhaps because we view the camera as an objective machine. The photograph is so easily seen as a depiction
of reality, an accurate window into history, the truth of an event, when in fact
photographs can be staged, doctored, and the content of the image chosen or content
disregarded. The camera is just a machine but the intentions of the
photographer both physically behind the camera and as the manipulator behind
the scenes, who through choices made in the moments before the shutter is opened
has chosen the content for the photograph. There is also a second opportunity
for manipulation occurring before the image is developed on a print by means of
doctoring the negative or shopping the digital image. Finally there is a third
opportunity for manipulation that occurs post-production and occurs when
differing explanations of images are given, captions are added, or albums are
created.
The Power of Photography and Memory
In the study Changing
History: Doctored Photographs Affect Memory for Past Public Events by Dario
L.M. Sacchi, Franca Agnoli, and Elizabeth F. Loftus found that if their
participants were shown digitally doctored images depicting the 1989 Tiananmen
Square protest and a 2003 protest in Rome against the War in Iraq these
participants’ memory of these events were significantly altered from what actually
occurred at these events.
For the
Tiananmen Square protest the famous Tank Man image was doctored to include
large groups of protesters gathered on both sides of the street. For the Rome
protest rally photograph aggressive-looking demonstrators and police officers
were added to the peaceful protest. The participants were split into groups in
which some viewed the original images and others viewed the manipulated images.
After viewing the images they were then asked a series of questions about the
events (1010).
A
significant finding from these experiments was, “that viewing modified images
affected not only the way people remember past public events, but also their
attitudes and behavioral intentions” (1019). The study also found the effect
similar for younger and older adults, regardless of whether the events were
recent enough to be remembered first hand.
This study indicates the fragility
of our memory and the power that photographs have in manipulating how we see
and understand history and the ease with which it can be, unbeknownst to us,
manipulated.
Before the Shutter is Opened
There are several ways a photograph can be deceptive from
the actual events and these are either created by what is photographed—through
framing, staging, or other narrative means—or by what is not photographed.
Of all of
Gardner’s Civil War photographs how many acknowledge that the Union forces
included former slaves, and yet in “A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Va. April,
1865,” they are presented in the menial role of collecting the forgotten dead (Trachtenberg 130) .
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| Gardner, Alexander What Do I Want, John Henry? GEH |
In William Frassanito’s book Gettysburg: A Journey in Time, Frassanito examines Alexander
Gardner’s images of Gettysburg and notices that in, “The Home of a Rebel
Sharpshooter” not only was the soldier probably an infantryman killed while
advancing up the hillside but also the weapon seen is not that of a
sharpshooter and further more is likely a prop owned and used by Gardner
(186-192). In Gardner’s Photographic
Sketch Book of the Civil War, he mentions how he visited the same nest
months later to find the musket rusted by storm and the skeleton undisturbed,
that none of those who searched the battlefield for the fallen had found him
(plate 41). He then goes on to proffer
that some poor mother is missing her son—how creditable is Gardner and oh how
we have been deceived.
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| Gardner Alexander The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter |
After the Shutter but Before the Print
There are multiple ways a photograph can be manipulated
prior to being printed. They can be retouched with brushes, cut to remove
figures or simply re-centered. These processes have been expanded and the loss
of fidelity has been almost entirely eliminated by experts when working with
digital images. These methods are used to manipulate, cause deception, and
alter the meaning of a photograph.
Studies
have shown that images can influence attitudes on social issues (Zillmann,
Gibson, & Sargent, 1999) and photographs are important retrieval cues for
the recollection of past events (Schacter, Koutstaal, Johnson, Gross, & Angell,
1997), so one can imagine the power an image like the photo-shopped Iranian
missile test had on the collective memory of everyone who viewed it on the
front page of all the national newspapers. (Morris, Photography as a Weapon) . In these doctored images an addition missil is added and a failed missil launch is removed. The shopped image was then the front page of many major newspapers.
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| from the NY Times |
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| from the NY Times |
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| from the NY Times |
The scariest aspect of our memory as pointed out by Hany Farid in Morris’ article is that we, “remember the picture. And there are psychology studies, when you tell people that information is incorrect, they forget that it is incorrect. They only remember the misinformation”
Images aren’t only
used to create a false narrative of the present but also to rewrite the
narrative of the past. This image of Trotsky, Kamenev, and Lenin as they took
turns addressing the troops was often used because of the iconic pose of Lenin,
but problems arose when Trotsky was exiled in the 1930s (Jaubert 31) . In the second photograph Trotsky was exiled
not only from the country but also from the collective memory of the event. In the doctored version of these photographs Trotsky has been painted out along with other individuals who were later deemed enemies of the state.
Post-Production
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| Fenton The Valley of the Shadow of Death [ON] |
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| Fenton The Valley of the Shadow of Death [OFF] |
For this example let’s look at two photographs by Roger
Fenton from the Crimean War. These
photographs have been titled Valley of
the Shadow of Death but additional titles have been adding to distinguish
between the two [ON] with the cannonballs on the road and [OFF] with the
cannonballs removed from the road. The great debate revolves around the order
in which the photographs were taken. Songtag writes, in Regarding the Pain of Others,
After reaching the much-shelled
valley approaching Sebastopol in his horse-drawn darkroom, Fenton made two
exposures from the same tripod position: in the first version of the celebrated
photo he was to call “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” (despite the title, it
was not across this landscape that the Light Brigade made its doomed charge),
the cannonballs are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before
taking the second picture—the one that is always reproduced—he oversaw the
scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself.
Sontag’s claim is that Fenton staged the second photograph
or more explicitly oversaw the staging of the cannonballs and then photographed
it because it is presumably more aesthetically captivating. One would think
that before writing something so scathing about someone she had never met
Sontag would of course have some evidence. It turns out that she doesn’t, but
has instead:
She overstated what [Mark
Haworth-Booth] said, which is very characteristic of her writing. It became
much more black and white and strident than it was when I said it. I was
raising doubts, but she assumed my doubts were a matter of fact rather than
speculation” (Morris, 10-11).
Morris sets out to determine the
order in which the photographs were taken. At first he interviews several
different curators with differing points of view on which photograph came first
and an interesting pattern emerges from the interviews. Those who believe the
order was [OFF] then [ON] have a tendency to believe Fenton to be a coward.
They also suspect that the image of the hillside is facing toward the allies,
in essence Fenton came down the road and turned around, shot the image, and
called it a day. Those that believe the order to be [ON] then [OFF] tend to
show some admiration for Fenton and note that there is little evidence but they
do have some facts like the valley was actually called the Valley of the Shadow
of Death by British soldiers and they note that Fenton mentioned the scattering
of cannon fire in a previous visit to the site.
Morris attempts to gather some empirical
evidence and visits the scene in Crimea and discovers that the view is actually
pointing north and toward the enemy encampment. Eventually by examining small
differences in the shifting of small rocks between the two pictures—in [OFF] the
rocks are higher on the hillside than they are in [ON]—Morris concludes that
the order is [OFF] then [ON].
While this does affirm Sontag’s and
several others’ theory their conclusions were not based on facts but based on
their psychological assessment of a man none of them had ever met. They were
reading from the photographs what they wanted to see and not what was actually
present.
The ease with which assumptions can
be made is evident by a simple changing of captions by Daniel Mooney’s
reinterpretation of some of the evidence Colin Powell presented to the United
Nations in 2003 as evidence for the invasion of Iraq. Reading what you want to
see in images as opposed to what is actually there swayed public opinion and
eventually lead to the invasion of a country.
Conclusions
The power and the ease with which photographs can be used as
deceptive tools abound and are ever expanding. It has been and will continue to
be critical for the viewers of images to obtain a level of visual literacy that
encourages a critical eye when viewing any image. Asking questions about the
function of an image, what happened right after and before the image was taken,
and what is beyond the frame of the image are all essential questions. We must
not end there when reading photographs, we must be aware of what we bring to
the table when we are reading an image and be aware of our own biases and attempt to not add them to a reading. It is essential to understand that the power of photography to
represent reality is as equal to its power to distort reality.
Works Cited
Frassanito,
William. Gettysburg: A Journey in Time. New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1975.
Jaubert, Alain. Making People Disappear. New York:
Pergmon-Brassey's International Defense Publishers, 1989.
Morris, Errol. Believing is Seeing. New York: Penguin
Press, 2011.
—. "Photography as a Weapon." The New York
Times 11 August 2008.
Nizza, Mike and Patrick J Lyons. "In an Iranian Image,
A Missile Too Many." The New York Times 10 July 2008.
Trachtenberg, Alan. "Through a Glass, Darkly:
Photography and Cultural Memory." Social Research 75.1 (2008):
111-132.
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