Assignment Three
Assignment
Three
Critical Essay
“Has the ‘digital revolution’ created more
problems than
opportunities for today’s professional
photographers?”
Text: 2598 words
Index of
images
Image
1 Newsweek and Time covers, June 1994
Image 2 Siggi Eggertsson, The Unknown,
http://www.siggieggertsson.com/The-Unknown
Image 3
https://www.pinterest.ch/pin/566468459356810553/visual-search/?x=10&y=10&w=544&h=554&cropSource=6
Image 4
Image 5 Paul Hansen (photo credit: AP/Paul Hansen,
Dagens Nyheter) November 20, 2012, Gaza City, The 2013 World Press Photo of the year https://www.timesofisrael.com/prize-winning-gaza-image-manipulated-critics-charge/
Image 6 Here Is New York. A Democracy of
Photographs https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/arts/design/11muse.html
Introduction
"After philosophy comes philosophy. But it is altered by the
after."
Jean-Francois Lyotard
“After photography comes
photography, but it is altered by the after.”
Hubertus von Amelunxen
“… Postphotography stands as a new universal language.”
Joan Fontcuberta
I have chosen to write a critical essay on “Has
the ‘digital revolution’ created more problems than opportunities for today’s professional
photographers?”
It is a debated and controversial topic, on which, after about
four decades from the birth of digital photography, different currents of thought
are still confronted today, with clear and, sometimes, antithetical positions.
The context originates from the fact that technological evolution
induces such profound and extensive changes in various fields, including the professional
one, that those who are subject to it (in this case professional photographers)
are practically forced to change part of their working methods. or to face
completely new ones.
The relationship between analog and digital photography, within a
wider scenario induced by the "digital revolution", is therefore
continually scrutinized and interpreted according to different currents of
thought.
Sometimes these currents originated totally new cultural and
professional movements.
In this critical essay, I will not analyze the problems /
opportunities created by the digital revolution for those who work in the
artistic/abstract field.
Instead, I will focus my analysis on professional digital
photography and its relationship with the representation of reality, whether
the latter is a point of arrival or a starting point towards the creation of a
result: representation, documentation, visual narrative, and photojournalism.
I will deepen the themes that are linked to the main threats /
opportunities that have arisen against the profession of photographer: photo
editing, digital manipulation, User Generated Content, Content Dissemination.
These themes will allow me to deepen on the ethics of altering
photos, the appropriation process, the from-scratch digitally "constructed"
image, the professional evolution of the digital photographer, the birth of new
work processes and new paradigms, the contamination of the so-called
"connected world".
New strategies, new photographers
If we compare the mindset and workflow of the born-digital and born-analog
photographer, we detect some substantial differences.
As Fred Ritchin (Ritchin, 2012) states, the born-digital
photographer applies an obsessively repetitive sequence of photographic
shooting - visualization of the resulting image. The photographer born-analog
and switched to digital or not, keeps (for how long?) an observation - planning
- shooting sequence: it essentially derives from the fact that, in the analog
world, the moments of shooting and viewing the result are separated by hours,
if not days.
“The
digital environment encourages new strategies and supports them with new
efficiencies. For the moment, however, an older, more intuitive way of working
yields to newer methods that are often still relatively simplistic. An analog
photographer in the field, unsure whether the pictures on the undeveloped film
are any good, who pushes herself to take more, possibly better photographs, is
working in a more instinctive, exploratory, and probably more "present''
way than the digital photographer who sees the results immediately and right
away decides whether to reshoot or not influenced by the initial results."
(Ritchin, 2012)
The digital photographer's approach, by successive approximations,
is compulsively focused on the continuous display of the shots taken and pushed
to the repeated refinement of the technical parameters. The author of the shot,
who should be particularly sensitive to the surrounding environment, to light,
and that subset that will be part of the photographic composition, is led to
isolate himself, to the advantage of the so-called "screen paradigm".
“Digital photographs,
frequently made while peering at the camera's back, concretize the central
paradigm of the screen. Veteran press photographers, for example, refer to
digital colleagues as "chimping" {said to be derived from the actions
of a chimpanzee), given that they can frequently be seen looking down at the
screen and pressing lots of buttons, even in the middle of an event- although
that may be preferable to what analog press photographers have long been
called: shooters.” (Ritchin, 2012)
If the "shielding" effect induced by the digital tool has obvious consequences on photojournalists (possibly creating more advantages in terms of efficiency and speed), I believe that the professional photographers of the digital age risk a "mediation" by the tool, which interferes with perception, the eye and the soul since the photographer defines the composition through another possible mediator, the electronic viewfinder.
It is a substantial mediation and can penalize photographic
design, that is, the act of conceiving the image before taking the shot.
Furthermore, the photographer, who, thanks to condescending technology, can
be exempted from technical/qualitative assessments such as, for example, the
quality of light and tonal degrees could be induced to passivize and disengage
from the content.
However, the intervention of technology to support the creation of the photographic image can also prove to be an opportunity.
The advanced photographer, partially exempt from technical issues/constraints, can concentrate on the content and not worry about masterfully managing the tool. Furthermore, he/her has the possibility of influencing technique and content at a later time, to the point of no longer having to use the photographic medium to create an image.
He can thus enter a world of pure perception and abstraction, where reality is no longer essential as an original "layer" on which to base the construction of the photographic work. Reality is relegated to the potential role of a source of inspiration, on the way to the conception of a visual work.
The photographer can cease to be the classic "photographer", and become a pure creator of content.
These statements may also apply to art photography and indeed, provide added value to the creative process.
In the case of documentation and photojournalistic photography, it is appropriate an ethical reflection on the life cycle and use of the photographic image.
Mark Deuze, in one of his essays (Deuze, 2005) defines the main traits that are associated with the figure of the professional journalist: he provides a public service, in being a "newshound", an active collector and a disseminator; he is impartial, neutral, objective, fair and therefore credible; he is free and independent; has a sense of immediacy and speed in dealing with the news; he has an ethical sense.
The photojournalist is expected to possess the same traits in creating, collecting, and proposing his own work.
In the digital world, where the photo editing process has taken over from work in the darkroom, the consistency of the traits described by Deuze is jeopardized by the possibility of graphic manipulation: the photographic shot loses part of the intrinsic value of truth and legitimacy that have been always recognized in analog work.
Thus a further paradox is born: the photojournalistic image, which is expected to have the function of certifying the truth and objectivity of the news, needs, in turn, to be ethically certified as the non-manipulation of reality.
Digital Photography and Ethics of Photo Alteration
Even before the advent of digital photography, the availability of
very expensive flat and roller scanners (for example Crossfield and Hell) and
the practice of digitally scanning slides led to the birth and evolution of
para-digital platforms for post-editing of images.
They have replaced, or rather, they have entered as an
intermediate step between the traditional darkroom development process and
printing.
With the advent of digital photography, the features of
photo-editing have reached the power of total image manipulation.
“….A new term created for the age of digital technology, a photoillustration is one that is altered to the point that the editors deem it is no longer ethical to consider it a photograph. …….. In the age of digital media this image is not the exception to the norm—it is the norm. We often assume that photographs do not need interpretation, especially in a journalistic context where it is assumed that they record the reality the journalist is attempting to convey. The inference of reality, however, is not always justified…..” (Schiller, 2008)
Technological evolution produces the distortion of the photographer's original nature: the apparently indissoluble bond between photographer and camera, like that between painter and brush, gradually loses its strength.
Often the manipulation of an image is done by those who publish and not by those who produce.
Stephen Mayes, Director of VII Photo Agency in 2012, in an interview with Wired Magazine addresses his criticism to an important magazine such as Time, which claims to have never manipulated the photographs published, but forgets to explicitly indicate that the cover photograph it is almost always manipulated.
The following image clearly shows how, in the intentions of the
publisher, the different lighting of the face in the same mugshot creates an
association of ideas dark = evil, probably in order to give greater emphasis to
the violent content of the story and to strike the reader-consumer.
Image 1 Newsweek and Time covers, June 1994
“It is a convention that we’ve learned very quickly. It’s not so
many years since there were scandals about manipulated covers; now it is
routine. We’ve absorbed it.” (Mayes, 2012)
The profession of photographer is flanked by other creative professions, based on new contents and new needs.
The photo editor is a professional figure with his own dignity. In the artistic field, photo-editing and the creative process without the aid of the photographic medium, or by appropriation, have given rise to real professional and artistic movements.
Image 2 Siggi Eggertsson, The Unknown, http://www.siggieggertsson.com/The-Unknown
From a certain point of
view, the professional photographer could be depleted of those characteristics
that made him unique and original, such as the ability to "see" with
the lens and "paint" with light.
Image 3 https://www.pinterest.ch/pin/566468459356810553/visual-search/?x=10&y=10&w=544&h=554&cropSource=6
From another point of view, the nature of the photographer, so distant from that of the photo-editor and graphic artist is sublimated and "saved" in the ability to return to observe reality and create professional and artistic content while maintaining a bond irreplaceable with reality.
Is Photography still the sign of the real?
In both the legal and journalistic fields, photography is the
protagonist of the ritual of telling a story and witnessing the truth.
“The historically established
belief in the authenticity of the photographic image has its roots in the
assumption that a physical-chemical apparatus can (re)produce the displaced
analogue image of an optically perceivable phenomenon. We believe in photography
just as we believe in our shadow.” (Amelunxen,
1996)
Whether it's late photography or photojournalism, photography is
used as a means to tell a story and inform about reality.
All this, despite having been amply demonstrated, observing the
work of Henry Peach Robinson as an example, that, since the nineteenth century,
even the analog image could be substantially manipulated.
Image
4
The following image has been the subject of an important controversy. A forensic analysis showed that the image is a set of three photographs and that it has been heavily post-edited.
Image 5 Paul Hansen (photo credit: AP/Paul Hansen, Dagens Nyheter) November
20, 2012, Gaza City, The 2013 World Press Photo
of the year https://www.timesofisrael.com/prize-winning-gaza-image-manipulated-critics-charge/
“…This photo is a compilation
of things that do exist, to form a person who never existed in this form, and
it looks entirely believable….” (Schiller, 2008)
In these words, one of the great paradoxes of digital photography
is defined in all its concreteness: photography, which can be altered to the
point of no longer being considered photography, loses its atavistic
cause-effect link with the photographic medium, which expects to be the
recorder of reality.
It is expected that the genuineness of the emotional impulse that
is created by the vision of the image is guaranteed by the "here and
now" of the pure photographic shot.
The photographer is expected, through his work, to put us in
contact with reality and not with a manipulative substitute.
The photographer is expected to be, in symbiosis with the
photographic medium and as such, the recorder of reality.
In the digital age, the photographic image is no longer
intrinsically true. It must be accompanied by a formal declaration, in the case
of legal procedures, and reassured by the professional's need to protect his or
her reputation and responsibilities in the journalistic field.
What looks real, could be untrue, what is claimed to be real, is
true.
The issues of reputation, validation of sources, and, ultimately,
the credibility of the media, are central and directly linked to the whirlwind
growth of the use of User Generated Content and the capacity for digital
manipulation.
All this has changed the rules of the game: the map of
responsibilities has been modified. A new player, the ordinary citizen, into
the context, demanding the professional to have an even more formally supported
role than that of reality recorder.
Democracy and images inflation
The digital revolution has
resulted in the inclusion of amateurs among professionals and has dramatically
expanded the population of photographic content producers.
"For
the first time we are producers and consumers of images, and the simultaneous
accumulation of these factors has caused an almost infinite iconic avalanche." (Fontcuberta, 2016)
We therefore face a inflation
of images: they are not previously selected, therefore not certified, then published
and disseminated immediately after their production. This action is within
everyone's reach, both from a technical point of view (smartphone) and from an
economic point of view (internet).
As stated in Fortune Magazine
(Mayes, 2012) ten percent of all photos ever taken were shot in 2011.
It is a fact that in this
context there are job losses in professional photojournalism, and it is also
objective that this inflation of images, the production of which is within the
reach of anyone, is producing addiction and difficulty in selecting quality
level.
"The image is no longer a
mediation with the world, but an amalgam of it, if not its raw material." (Fontcuberta, 2016)
The addiction generated by the
sight of images scattered without selection is of the same nature. They arrive
directly to the user as they were created, without a presentation strategy and
without narrative and quality mediation by the professional.
"Anyone who places
himself in front of these images must therefore engage in a different way to
avoid that the excessive charge of pathos that passes through them makes them
devoid of testimony value; if we usually recognize the undisputed testimonial
value of photographs, the reaction they arouse implies something absolutely
unprecedented… .. "(Crescimanno, April 2013)
New forms of evaluation and
judgment arised, which are conveyed through “likes” and comments. Today anyone
can create a blog in which to publish their photos and expose themselves directly
to the evaluation of followers.
The work is evaluated and
becomes eventually “viral” on the base of quantity of "likes"
The figure and work of the
professional photographer risk being "flattened" and devalued, as in
all contexts where the selection is bypassed and where the producer of the
content is both judge and user,
"The idea of the excess of
images ....... deserves a more in-depth and critical treatment that not only
implies the specific conditions of the image, but also the logic of its
management, dissemination and control ..." (Fontcuberta, 2016)
However, in today's world, anyone
has the opportunity or feel the need to take a photograph of an event they
witness: is it correct that professionals judge negatively this amateur practice
and come to ostracize a content, even when it keeps its promise of testimonial
commitment?
“The
transition from analog to digital photography was a pivot point, but it is a
pivot that wasn’t fully recognized in that working with these large DSLR
cameras we’ve been able to mimic [analog] photography as we know it. The
cellphone is a pretty pure implementation of the digital phenomenon.” (Mayes, 2012)
Is it correct that the professionals, in an attempt to differentiate
themselves, protect their existence by retreating into inaccessible and
snobbish niches, almost ignoring the "digital revolution"?
"On the other hand, the advantage of this excess is the consequent exhaustive and immediate access to the images, which thus lose the condition of luxury items enjoyed in the past." (Fontcuberta, 2016)
I believe that today's professional photographers should fully intercept change (many already do) and recognize the opportunities to enter, with the decisive support of their professionalism, in these new currents of dialectic and visual narrative.
Clement Cheroux, photography historian and curator of the photographic fund of the Center Pompidou in Paris, regarding the photographic coverage of the events of September 11 (Cheroux, 2010), has verified that most of the newspapers published after the event always selected the same reduced set of six photographs, as if to standardize photographic information in order to maintain exclusive control over information.
This alleged strategy was offset by the "Here is New York. A Democracy of Photographs ”(Peres + Others, 2002), where space was given, both in an exhibition of five thousand photographs and in a photographic edition, to what the citizens of New York experienced and wanted to testify.
Image 6 Here Is New York. A Democracy of Photographs https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/arts/design/11muse.html
Which is the best sign of the real,
between professional and citizen initiatives,?
The social role of the professional
photographer in the digital age
As I wrote previously, the advent of the digital age has allowed the birth of the citizen-photographer and the proliferation of User Generated Content.
Joan Fontcuberta states (Fontcuberta, 2016) that technology has speeded up the production and dissemination of images that were previously subject to a professional, certified, but exclusive and slower workflow.
".... a change of canon in photojournalism is assumed: speed prevails over the decisive moment, speed over refinement." (Fontcuberta, 2016)
Given that the role of the citizen-photographer is clear, unequivocal and intrinsically social, as an insider by definition in a community and in the events that run through it, I therefore ask myself how the professional photographer should be placed towards contexts in which he is an outsider and whether this position has changed in the digital age.
I think nothing has changed in this sense.
In 1985, the American photographer James Nachtwey, aged 36 and shortly before being associated with the Magnum agency, wrote his "Credo".
“For me, the strength of
photography lies in its ability to evoke a sense of humanity. If war is an
attempt to negate humanity, then photography can be perceived as the opposite
of war and if it is used well it can be a powerful ingredient in the antidote
to war…..
….The worst thing is to feel that as a photographer I am
benefiting from someone else’s tragedy. This idea haunts me. It is something I
have to reckon with every day because I know that if I ever allow genuine
compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition I will have sold my soul. The
stakes are simply too high for me to believe otherwise.” (Nachtwey, 1985)
As in the analog age, in the digital age
the photographer has the duty to combine his social function with his legitimate
personal and professional aspirations.
According to Benjamin, photography has the
ability to support the senses in the mutation of their relationship with reality
(Benjamin, 2012). If this is true, the photographer has the ability to convey
knowledge in a different and more performative way, with the support, not the
interference, of the technical medium.
If technology and its progression are
conveyed by human needs, it is essential to prevent it from dominating and
contributing to the reduction of human sensitivity in the relationship between
reality and the creation of content.
The transition from analog to digital
created the conditions for a different relationship with reality, which it was
thought might fail, compared to tradition.
"The
history of photography from analogue to digital could consequently be summed up
with the transition from a medium for the exploration of reality, for the
documentation and representation of the technological changes of the twentieth
century to an instrument that increasingly emphasizes the aspects spectacular
and playful, it detaches itself from reality, however, at the same time risking
losing value and capacity for signification; against this drift and in
opposition to any reductionism that cuts off any connection between image and
reality, it is necessary to insist on the possible virtuous uses of the new
medium. "
(Crescimanno, 2013)
It was necessary to conceive new paradigms
and new ways of proposing content.
For this reason, initiatives such as Pixel
Press, which exploit the ability of the network to dynamically integrate the
information contained in the single image (the hyperphotography paradigm) are
essential in redefining the identity of the professional photographer, the
nature of digital photography, the strengthening of its social value.
".... why not also give voice to the subject of the
photograph?" (Ritchin,
2012)
Conclusion
New paradigms, strategies and styles have in
some cases posed problems and in many cases created opportunities for the photographers
who became digital, remodeling their background and professional practice.
I believe that, in the face of any potentially
disruptive change, the most effective reaction was that of those who, having the
privilege to have experienced both analog and digital worlds, were ready to
seize all the opportunities of the new and, with all the values of experience,
enrich their practice.
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