ethics of photography

After viewing a CGI (computer generated imagery) extravaganza at a local movie theatre last week, a friend said "You really can't trust a photograph to be real any longer, can you?"  His words not only related to the movie but to a friend of his who had altered a photograph of whales. PhotoShop has made it possible to change photographs in a wide variety of ways.  Many professionals would say that these computer programs are just tools, along with digital cameras, to take photography to a new level.  Purists shoot film and develop in the darkroom where they can crop, filter, burn, dodge, spot, solarize, and tone photographs, and change the feel of them using different developers, papers, and exposure times.  The process of adding or subtracting elements is also possible in the darkroom but it is quite a bit more difficult and time consuming than using PhotoShop.  Most people have not spent time in a darkroom, but many have access to PhotoShop or other programs, so changes are now much more widespread.

My philosophy leans toward the purists, despite the fact that I primarily use digital technology, and I hope that photojournalists, particularly, have retained their ethics about photo alteration.  It is difficult enough to differentiate between reality and spin these days in the "news", and images are aired so quickly and repeatedly that their influence is profound.  It is, indeed, a question that will be pondered for aeons, just a literary and other artistic license have always been discussed.

All of this leads me to the photographs below.  I photographed Victoria in September, 1997, for my book A Place Like No Other:  people of a enchanted land, near the Aspen Vista trail above Santa Fe.  She had her two great danes with her, a breeze was blowing, and neither of us wanted to attract too much attention. Thus, as you can see below, there are pieces of grass in the photograph that, to me, are distracting.  Would you remove them or leave them as part of reality?

In the photograph below, would you be tempted to crop or change the position of her left leg to reduce the emphasis of her knee?

These are the sorts of things I ponder every time I photograph and load images into the computer.  Just a little something to chew on during these blustery, spring days.

until next Monday,

DB

a passion for the image