As i mentioned yesterday, i haven't been productive lately (good pictures coming soon though). So instead of boring you with a substandard picture today, i have decided to opt for a change... and bore you with a substandard essay. For today, i'd like to examine photographic integrity, or as the New York Times photocritic (excuse my fetish with portmanteaux) Andy Grundberg puts it so well, the Crisis of the Real.

In fact, this issue has been lingering in my mind for a long time now, ever since i read The Real and the True : The Digital Photography of Pedro Meyer by the established Latin American (born Spanish) photojournalist Pedro Meyer, whose writing and pictures could also be found online at ZoneZero.

Meyer is certainly a revolutionary, probably with blood of the likes of Guevara running in him. For one, he was quick to embrace digital photography and the many possibilities it offers. He also readily recognized the growing proliferation of "consumer-level" imaging products, such as cheap compact cameras and even handphone cameras. In an editorial titled The icons of this war...¹, Meyer wrote,

"I don't think it's too far fetched to assume that the main icons of this second US war in Iraq in 2004, still in process, will be the amateur digital pictures of the tortures performed on Iraqui detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad."

He continued,

"Cristóbal Bouroncle the head of Agence France Press (AFP) in Baghdad... explained to us that western professional journalists are hard to come by, in the context of Iraq... While local photographers are doing a very good job as they all have access that westerners do not enjoy... they get paid far less than western photojournalists... And last but not least, with digital cameras, they are able to send out people new to photography to take pictures with minimal training."

The same phenomenon could also be observed in the more recent London Underground bombings. The most widely circulated, and indeed the most remembered photograph is perhaps a low-resolution picture taken with the mobile phone of a commuter who along with many others had to walk along the tunnels after train services halted.

Instead of chiding this growing trend of "unprofessionalism" in photojournalism, Meyer accepted it as the inevitable future, and even urged traditional photojournalism to "have a second look at reality and be prepared to tell their students that things are no longer how they used to be and therefore need to adjust their expectations."

While being insightful in many aspects (Meyer also lobbies for greater liberties in copyright issues, but that'd better be discussed in a different boring essay), Meyer is nonetheless a controversial figure in today's photojournalism circle. He is an open advocate of image manipulation, or "photoshopping", even within the realms of documentary photography.

For a start, Meyer argued that the so-called "decisive moment", in which all elements within the camera's captive frame come together by chance (or God's Will if you believe in that sort of things), was a matter of luck more than anything else. "To our good fortune we can now say that we are no longer dependent on our luck but on our imagination," celebrated he².

As a matter of fact Meyer often manipulates his images, mostly by combining two or more pictures taken at separate times to create something he calls "photographic poetry"³.

Personally i find all these notions more than acceptable – i do "photoshop" my images too: the regular burning and dodging, changing levels and curves, adding or eliminating colour casts, and the occasional cloning away of undesirable elements – until Mr Meyer decided to defend Brian Walski, the disgraced Los Angeles Times photographer in Iraq who was fired for combining two photographs he took in an effort to produce a more dramatic picture.

What Walski had done, argued Meyer, had merely served to illustrate his messages better. Manipulation of the images was perfectly acceptable since the photographer felt that by doing so, his perception of what he actually saw at the scene would be more clearly and strongly conveyed. Trust the photographer, not the photograph, insisted Meyer.

What Meyer then did was to challenge the limit of "acceptable" manipulation. Selective editing that could significantly influence viewer emotion, including cropping and old-school dodging and burning, has always been around, he argued, so where do you draw the line? The purists have always demanded truth, but what is truth? Distortion in lenses, different colour tendencies of films, even black and white photographs are all deviations from what the photographer actually saw. The important thing, Meyer concluded, is for the photographer to be able to tell through his picture what he perceived rather than saw, and for the mass to be educated in a new way so that they will realize that photography has never been the "truth" of anything.

In fine art photography, for which even the most hardlined purists have never insisted on faithful representation of "truth", i totally agree with creative doctoring of images. However, i'd just like to counterargue that human beings enjoy and value beauty in coincidences. My favourite picture of his, titled Todos Somos Palomas(We Are All Doves), was a combination of three separate shots. But i often thought how marvelous it must be if it really happened that way. It's just like how the flying basketball hit the running boy square as we watched on America's Funniest Home Videos. With today's technology, it could be easily reproduced in computer graphics, but that wouldn't be half as funny.

In the realms of journalistic and documentary photography, however, Meyer's arguments are totally unacceptable. The fundamental task, of course, is to establish what "truth" constitutes. It is quite plain that absolute truth is quite impossible to exist since, as human beings, we have individual thoughts, morals, and values. Even if the entire world is brought to witness a particular event in situ, each would see the same scenes but perceive his or her own relative truths based on individual cultures, beliefs, experiences et cetera.

Therefore, it is safe to say that biases do not make truth untruthful. In fact, every picture published in newspapers, journals, on the Internet, is a political statement. By choosing which pictures to print, editors are selecting the version of truth they wish to present to their viewers.

With truth thus defined, it is safe to say that cropping is still a highly acceptable practice. So are dodging and burning or contrast/brightness adjustment, since these techniques do not alter firstly the fundamental appearance of elements in the picture (dressed people do not become naked, for example), and secondly the relationship of the elements to one another (the naked people do not start to pile onto one another, for example).

What Mr Meyer does on a regular basis, however, is beyond the scope of acceptability. He once placed a money-handling man next to an assumably poor woman slaughtering a lamb, claiming that these two personalities were found in the same location and the final picture was essentially the impression he received from that trip to Ecuador. Such process Meyer termed making "an image a stronger one, by either eliminating, adding, re organizing (sic), those pieces of information which make up the picture."⁴

Meyer further argued that if writers could rearrange words, photographers should be able to reorganize elements in their pictures to produce "a depiction of what the photographer saw and which portends to represent that reality in as objective a manner as possible."

i wish to point out that it is exactly because of "past traditions and customs", which Mr Meyer so scorned upon, as well as past technical limitations that people have come to place more faith in a photograph than words. Even now, when digital manipulation of images is so easily done, words can still be much more easily contrived and manipulated to its writer's fancy.

While there is indeed increasing occurences of "fake" photographs, the effect of which having become more widespread with the advent of the Internet, it is not high time to break the ethical code of documentary and journalistic photographers. By doing so, the long-built faith in photography as one of the most faithful record of human history (or other more mundane stuffs) would break down as well. That is perhaps good news for Mr Meyer's creativity, but surely bad news for journalistic credibility.

Well, that being said, i guess i should draw an end to your misery. If you have managed to read thus far, congratulations, i hope you find that my writing skills are on par with my photographic ones, which is to say they are both not very impressive. i'll post a picture tomorrow, it's so much easier...

References

¹ The icons of this war..., May 2004.
² The Instant, December 2000.
³ The poetry of an image, October 2002.
⁴ Redefining Documentary Photography, April 2000.