Project 5 – The Manipulated Image (Exercise 2)

For this exericse, we are instructed to read pages 73-75 of Photography: A Critical Introduction (4th edition) by Liz Wells. The section is titled ‘The Real and the Digital’.

We are to answer the question (from both sides of the argument) ‘Does digital technology change how we see the truth?’

After reading these pages, we can definitely argue for both sides of the question. We have the understanding that images have been manipulated since the early days of photography, but with digital media we are able to manipulate them even further. These manipulations can vary from having small alterations such as moving something or even just changing some colouration, to huge alerations such as removal of objects or adding new objects. These can change how the photo is looked at, and they’re not ‘the truth’ as the photo is of something that did not actually exist and this is an issue with documentary photography in particular. Liz Wells says “if a photograph is not of something already existing in the world, how can we react it as an accurate record of how things are?” which is a very good question. Manipulation removes the ‘truth’ behind an image and can make us question how much manipulation is in the everyday photos we see that are labelled as ‘the truth’?

 

However, as Liz Wells points out, “we can, of course, observe that, as we have already seen, the manipulation of images is nothing new and that photographs have been changed, touched-up or disorted since the earliest days”. So, does digital technology change how we see the truth? If photography has been manipulated since the beginning, nothing has changed with the addition of digital technology. But as long as the original traces of the event the photo is taken of, and the signs within remain, then even after manipulation, the truth is still within the photograph.

It’s a difficult question to answer. Knowing that manipulation has always been a thing in photography does make you think that no, digital technology has not changed how we see the truth. Digital technology definitely makes us more able to see the truth I believe, due to the availability of photographs from wherever we are in the world. But manipulation is easier and makes us question how many of these photos are the ‘truth’. And what genres really require the truth? Some genres of photography blend together and are difficult to differentiate between, and some allow manipulation with no issues as they’re not the ‘truth’ but some, you’d hope they’re accurate to what the eye saw when the photo was taken.

References:

Oca-student.com. (n.d.). [online] Available at: https://www.oca-student.com/sites/default/files/oca-content/key-resources/res-files/ph4can_the_real_and_the_digital.pdf [Accessed 3 Aug. 2019].

Wells, L. (2015). Photography: A Critical Introduction. 4th ed. London: Routledge, pp.73-75.

Project 5 – The Manipulated Image (exercise 1)

For this exercise, we are instructed to photoshop an image. We make a composite image that appears to be documentary but isn’t actually.

I wasn’t too sure what to do and my photoshop skills aren’t great and I’m using my laptop which has a track-pad, as the full version of Photoshop CC has not yet been released for iPads, which is what I would most likely have preferred to do this exercise with. I tend to only use Lightroom for my photography, occasionally using Photoshop to remove things like people or bins using content aware, but I have never added things to an image. I decided to put a photo of my cat Ellie in the garden, which would never happen as she is an indoor cat.

The Original Images:

Subject image

Background image

The Final Image:

I at first had this in colour and it looked much worse, so after adding Ellie into the photo, which was difficult to do using a track-pad on my laptop, I turned the image black and white in Lightroom & adjusted some settings around Ellie so she blended in a bit better. This is most definitely not my best work, but an interesting exercise and I can see that it could be quite simple to manipulate a documentary image, bringing into the question how often we see these manipulated images without realising.

The final image